This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly (well, more or less!) open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank — but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with one exception. There’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the current virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Meanwhile, I have some good news for those of my readers who have been waiting for the new edition of The Weird of Hali, my seven-volume epic fantasy with tentacles. All the editorial work is done, the covers are settled, and the squamous, rugose presses are starting their eldritch work. The release date for the new edition? October 31 of this year. If you’re interested, advance copies can be ordered here if you’re in the United States and here if you’re elsewhere.
With that said, have at it!
Good morning JMG! One thing I’m curious about is what you would consider to be the most essential older occult works–older in this case being pretty much anything pre Eliphas Levi. I know that Agrippa, Bruno, and Paracelsus are all prominent names; do they or others have essential work that anyone interested in the subject should make sure not to miss?
Some links of interest:
A while back, I remember a Dutch reader here expressing doubt that at the assumption that the changes in agricultural policy in his country were really handed down by the WEF. Well, here’s a letter from Prof. Schwab to Mark Rutte in 2020, inviting him to Davos and saying:
“In view of the leading role the Netherlands has taken in steering Europe’s recovery efforts and the future of Europe, your perspectives on building the Great Reset at a global level with the international community would be highly appreciated.”
Source: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/great-reset/wef-lobbied-dutch-government-to-push-great-reset/
Also, regarding the recent news from Russia: James Corbett has an interesting interview with Rolo Slaviskiy, a blogger who was predicting a Wagner-led coup six months ago. The gist of it is that Prighozin, regardless of whether one trusts him or not, is a figure to watch in Russian politics, an ambitious man with military and legal experience, and political ambitions who has been courting elements of the Russian opposition. To quote JMG: go long on popcorn futures…
Audio interview here: https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1813-wtf-just-happened-in-russia-with-rolo-slavskiy/
Hello JMG: I have wanted to write to you for a while to tell you how much I appreciate your writings, both here and in the books you have had published. I am currently reading The Druidry Handbook, but have read The Druid Path also. But I have to say that the book that you wrote Mystery Teachings of the Living Earth is one of the most interesting ones I have ever read.
I was recently having a political discussion with someone from a very traditional left-wing background, and I told him about the laws in the book,and showed him my copy. Because it is my thought that things wont change much for the better until we adopt a new ethics that really focuses on the natural world and our place in it. I don’t know how that will come about. I’m old and may not be around for a long time, but I remember the first Earth Day and the discussions that followed that, and all the efforts that came out of that consciousness. Anyway, thank you for your work and for the support it gives to people who are trying to figure out how to live in the world in a balanced and respectful way.
Hello John Michael Greer, I was going to have a question for you, or rather a series of questions, I would be glad if you could answer. Now let’s get started: as you mention in your End of the Industrial Age the intellectual toolkit of the classical world survived thanks to Christianity (and I am currently trying to learn that curriculum) similarly can you explain exactly what is the intellectual toolkit of the ‘modern’ world (it may be necessary to put some parts in the toolbox) and Another question I have is what needs to be done while the Second Religiousness is slowly becoming visible, and I am a Turkish Language and Literature student. I would like your advice. I would be very grateful if you could answer my questions, good writing, we look forward to your posts !
Hey JMG,
I have been re-reading The Long Descent. It’s a great book and the first book of yours that I read. Something I noticed, though, was the air of finality that the first chapter was written, in the book you asserted that peak oil in the United States had already happened and that global peak oil would happen shortly. It seems like this hasn’t panned out yet, oil production globally and in the United States is still growing, although COVID caused it to crash a bit back in 2019.
I understand it from the circumstances. At the time that you were writing the book, oil production in the United States had peaked in the 1970s and had been declining for years just as Hubbard predicted. What nobody could have predicted was how significant the fracking boom would be.
What do you think about the peak oil situation now, what were you right about, what were you wrong about, and do you think that fracking and other techniques will allow industrial civilization to continue metastasizing for much longer? When do you think we will reach peak oil for real, or are we already there?
I shared this before but it was pretty deep in a previous post, so I’ll repeat it for anyone who missed it – I was on a podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUB4GrRwLKs. It’s basically an hour and a half of me on why 100 years of communist organisational and economic planning theory is wrong, and what to do instead. 🙂 They also did a follow up on the same subject that I wasn’t on, but thoroughly endorse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceGbtDTYSlU.
hi John,
I recently saw a presentation by Dr. Stephen Greer, “The Lost Century.” His core contention is that free energy (drawn from the seething quantum vacuum) has been suppressed by stolen patents, assassinated inventors, etc. abetted by a media blackout. (Back-engineered UFOs also figure into it, but one gets the impression that Earthbound ingenuity would have been more than sufficient to get us going.) Corporations and governments would rather reap power and profit, Dr. Greer contends, even if the planet is being destroyed in the process.
Certainly free energy could make a difference in solving the world’s problems, although one would have to take into account the heat produced by the use of that energy which, in great enough quantities, would create ecological problems of its own. The deeper question though, is what would any advanced technology lead to if we humans are going to deploy it for oneupmanship, status, etc. It’s said that “money merely makes you more of what you are.” I think the same is true for nature’s money, energy. Look what we did with the fossil fuel bonanza, which for a time was a decent approximation to free energy.
I had an strange thought about The Weird of Hali. The Radiance have the ability to alter people’s minds and totally cut them off from the spirit world. If a temporary and completely reversible version of that could be developed, it may actually help the forces of the Old Gods. They could do it to any willing volunteer, who would then know what total detatchment felt like. When they snapped back ten minutes or an hour later, they’d have the experience of both and be able to make their own decision. From the way the experience is described, the vast majority would throw in with the tentacles.
@JMG
I have just a couple of questions:
1) On the other blog, you mentioned that you’re working on a fictional plot set in a technic civilization some 100000 years in our future. In that, you also mentioned that there have been more than 10 technic civilizations (you used the word ‘technate’) in the intervening period, with our civilization being the First Technate. So, I’m curious to know about what kind of technological achievements you expect future Technates to accomplish, given the fact that they’ll be working on a far smaller energy budget than the one we enjoy. Do you think it’s possible for at least one future Technate to do something like the moon landing, or the Voyager missions, or deep-sea exploration? What technologies similar to currently extant ones do you expect future Technates to independently develop, given that they will likely use hydraulic computers to crunch numbers, and organic-ceramic composites instead of metals?
2) You have stressed the importance of using history as a guide to predicting the future, at least as regards the rise and fall of civilizations. On the other hand, Nassim Taleb has long been an advocate for the view that relying on past data is unreliable. Could this dichotomy be resolved by considering that life at a local level is stochastic, but at a global level is deterministic? The former accounts for Taleb’s argument, while the latter agrees with your views.
I realize that examples of how corrupt and propagandized the main stream media is are too common to list and not exactly news. But this one by the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof is beyond the pale.
“The real meaning of the Hunter Biden saga, as I see it, isn’t about presidential corruption, but is about how widespread addiction is–and about how a determined parent with unconditional love can sometimes reel a child back: https://nytimes.com/2023/06/24/opinion/father-hunter-biden-addiction.html… That can give others hope.”
The quote is from his official tweet about his opinion column in the Times. I think that at this point the apparatchiks at Pravda in the old Soviet Union would be blushing or green with envy at the new heights their modern day equivalents in the USA can get away with. I am not sure how this guy ( Kristof) can sleep at night. It doesn’t seem like any amount of money is enough to protect you from the bad karma that this sort of dishonesty must bring down on you eventually.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, I would LOVE to some day see a focused discussion here on the social, political and psychological phenomenon of conformity, something which I have noticed, and which has both puzzled and disturbed me, from a very early age (at least since kindergarten).
Why is it that some people, an apparent minority, can so easily think critically and for themselves, and see through the self-serving messaging and propaganda of the ruling power class, while others, even and especially those considered highly intelligent, do not and can not?
I’ve always felt that this herd mentality phenomenon is a grievously underexplored and underappreciated topic, particularly as so many critical aspects of politics and social policy are directly influenced, if not absolutely determined, by conformity (the kneejerk public responses to the recent so-called pandemic being just one example of this).
I’m seeing an AI future where a data miner assembles your dossier from online posts, traffic and surveillance cameras, financial transactions, phone and vehicle tracking, contact tracing, medical records, and all other forms of data collection and record keeping stored in electronic form. An AI analyzer then processes it and, if it determines you to be guilty of wrongdoing (or wrongthink), contacts an automated dispatcher to send a squadron of robocops to your door. Since you have already been determined to be guilty, the robocops have the authority to use lethal force if necessary, so don’t try to run. No human intervention is required at any stage of this process.
Likely? Or just a morbid fantasy?
Keeping it portable
As someone with various factors in my natal chart that indicate constant disruption on a personal level, and someone with an unending interest in practicing esoteric disciplines, I have as a consequence had to develop my own tools for doing that, adapted from the more complex and elaborate disciplines available for people with fewer of these obstacles to deal with. I can’t say that what I have undergone hasn’t been productive. I have no complaints: my inner-level connections have consistently been informative and even helpful.
But I’ve had to keep my disciplines “portable.” What do I mean by that? Well, I spent 25 years practicing various Buddhist meditation techniques and did prolonged academic study of languages, history and so on resulting in an MA in that topic. FYI, all the preps I have done are part of my toolkit. Before that, I studied with one of the better-known esoteric mail-order training programs (SOLA). Before that, I read and re-read everything I could lay my hands on, including most of the then-available works of Dion Fortune, W.G.Gray, and a great many more. And I’ve studied with a group practicing things from Z’ev Shimon Ben Halevi (Warren Kenton’s) writings that was in active contact with that writer.
So my preparations have not been minor, but my practices have had to be portable, subject to constant disruption. Portable, does not mean without preparation, it means short daily practices that can be done on the fly, if need be. Coupled with active inner-plane contact or contacts that I can relate with and communicate with, however imperfectly, as needed.
When I was younger, I longed to be able to engage in the full panoply of ritual practice. I explored, I made the effort, I memorized the Trees and the colors of the paths and spheres and deities and so on that appertain thereto. It was very inspiring and believe me, I received good stuff in many ways. Before that, I longed for and attempted other things. After 74 years of life, I have adjusted to my own situation. I don’t lack the mental facility to do what less unsettled folks are able to do, but starting again and again and again and again from a personal life bomb site (as it were) has taught me that portable is the key to my own situation.
Why am I sharing what could be interpreted as an esoteric sob story? As I say, I’m content enough these days with the status quo. My very portable and short status quo. You may have Uranus conjunct a weak Sun, opposed to your Moon or Venus, or at the Nadir conjunct the 4th cusp, or other interesting aspects in your chart that speak to a similar need. I’m not saying which of those apply to me by the way, because I can discuss astrological challenges elsewhere, this is not the point of my entry here. As things get interesting in our world’s ongoing empire collapse, you may in any case have to adapt your current more elaborate daily practice to something that can be done on the fly. In any case, keep preparing, keep studying, and always have a “go-bag” of portable stuff in your toolkit. It may save your life one day, just as a physical go-bag might.
Just sayin’.
There is an interesting article at RT today about PM Modi’s recent visit to DC. The article is written by a retired Indian diplomat, who appears to welcome signs of increasing realism and reasonableness from the Biden admin.
This reasonableness looks to me like a case of when the cat is away…The neocon fanatics being distracted by their bloodlust and revanchist hatred of Russia, the more sensible factions at State and in the WH can begin some constructive diplomacy without having screaming harpies like La Kagan in their way. This also suggests to me that matters in Ukraine must be going very badly indeed.
Moon of Alabama thinks that the mercenary revolt in Russia came about because the Russian govt. decided enough was enough with these guys and proposed to enroll the mercs in the Russian armed forces. That would have seriously cut into the leader’s income, so he tried for a coup, like the condottieri used to do in Italy. And here some of us Americans were gleefully telling ourselves that the CIA can’t even do a successful coup anymore, and possibly can finally be disbanded for incompetence if not for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Hey John,
I have loved your writing since an American friend introduced me to it. I live in India, and your works aren’t easy to get in bookstores around here. I generally find them on Google’s Play Store and read them on the Google Play Books app on my Android tablet. Recently, I have been looking for your fiction works in the Weird of Hali series, but I didn’t find any book formats in the Play Store.
I found Nathaniel Bonnell’s rendition of the Innsmouth audio book – which is great, and he is an excellent narrator (and also author) – but I would prefer to have the readable format, since (1) I am not a native speaker of English, so I find it sort of difficult to catch on to the accents of native speakers, especially on some tricky words; and (2) I generally prefer reading over listening.
Is there any specific reason why you did not put your fiction works up on Play Books in a readable format? Does it have to do with the possibility of piracy? I am not complaining or anything, just curious.
Also, I love the work you are doing to address the unsustainability crisis of modern industrial civilization. It is an issue which finds so little mention in our time! Back in my childhood, I have actually experienced regular load-sheddings for over two hours in our home, and we still have load-sheddings on some occasions (although nowadays we burn more fuel and ensure a steadier supply in urban areas). I can imagine what the future would be like once the fuels begin to run out, although I can barely imagine how painful it must be in colder countries like the US and the nations of Europe where it snows. I have a pen friend in Hungary, and from his description I think the climate is quite brutally cold there.
I must also thank you for your non-fiction works. I have learnt much from them. Your discussion on intelligentsia and its privileged but alien culture in The King in Orange helped me to better understand the social, cultural and political situation in my own country. Indian and American politics have a lot in common – from polarization along ideological lines, the smug apathy of the intelligentsia and its tendency to educate (and indoctrinate) more people than can be placed into managerial jobs, to the futile religious naivety of the very conservative and the toxic, mindless subversiveness of the left.
Reading your works has helped me to better understand the history and present-day situation of my own country, which has been of great help in forming an educated opinion about where we stand and where we are going. Of course, there are significant differences between the politics of India and the USA – for instance, the primary debate in the USA is about what to do next and how to craft the future, while in India the discourse is mostly centered around the federative question. The seven decades we have had since independence have been filled with immense demographic changes, and the tribunal-like union of the myriad linguistic, religious and social groups under the high horse of the Indian National Congress is no longer a pliable solution to the question of what basis should underlie the unity and solidarity of this immensely diverse multicultural nation. This has resulted in growing tensions as different interest groups strive to support ideologies and national narratives that best suit their needs and interests.
I hope to see you continue writing and enlightening us with your calm, erudite and unimpeachable analysis of the individual and collective human experience. Your blogs and books have ever been an immense source of wisdom and joy for me, and I do feel a good burst of euphoria every time I see a new post on this website. Your recent discourse on Enchantment is especially eye-opening. I love the fact that you have a genuine understanding of Evolution, as so few people do. I also appreciate your precise understanding of the epistemological underpinnings of Indian Philosophy, and its focus on Final Participation. As soon as I read midway through your discussion on the ideas of Barfield, I was immediately thinking about Vedanta. It was a genuine delight to see you follow up with the exact connection within a paragraph or two of the connection popping up in my head.
Wishing you and your family good health and success in your endeavours.
After our recent forays into the world of Happy Hippies with WHPY, new Imaginary Radio stations are taking a week or two here and there to ferment and coagulate new stations within our secret laboratory on Kearsarge Mountain over the summer, so a few repeats will also be offered here and there on the shortwaves.
So if you missed it the first time around, please join us once again for an evening of HAaRP music and Accordionospheric Bliss with Toots vs. WELK!
https://i.redd.it/u7drnfnh7s8b1.jpg
We’ve pulled out all the stops to let these harmonic waves wash over you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_y56lbbtbc&t=4s
https://www.mixcloud.com/kmtsradio/
Imaginary Stations airs every Sunday at 2200 UTC on 9395 kHz. Grab your shortwave and start retrovating the future of what radio could be!
.:. 23 .:. 73 .:.
Renewable energy data for the Bonneville Power Administration, month of May.
For wind power, the worst day was 5/18 where the windfarms produced 2% of nameplate capacity. The best day was 5/31 where they produced 79.3% of capacity. For the month the average was 26.7%
For solar things were complicated by what was obviously scheduled maintenance. Ignoring that day the worse day was 5/5 where the panels produced 10.4% of capacity, and the best day was 5/23 where they produced 49% of capacity. Monthly average (excluding the maintenance day) was 32.8%.
The longest dunkelflaute was only 3.3 hours. The wind was actually somewhat reliable for the month. June has been windy too.
The local nuclear reactor was down most of the month for refueling. Spring is when they like to do it as the power demand is lower and the water flow through the dams is highest. They swapped out 1/3 of the fuel modules, and reshuffled the rest. It should be good for two more years.
Wonderful news on The Weird of Hali! I had to put off reading them for my year of only dead authors, and then I wanted to wait for the new edition to get a hold of them, so I’m glad that it seems to be going ahead on schedule.
As for a question, while I still have my fingers crossed that a “Military History of the De-Industrial Future” will one day win a fifth Wednesday vote, there are only so many of those to around, and so many topics, so it looks like I’ll have to get off my rump and do some thinking for myself.
One topic that comes to mind is whether machine guns could be a viable technology without an industrial base, and even if so, if they would continue to dominate close to medium quarters battle as thoroughly as they have for the past century and some change. So, my base question for JMG and anyone else with thoughts is that: could machine guns remain viable with a non-fossil-fuel driven industrial base?
To give a bit more context, and I invite comment on this as well from JMG or anyone else interested, a key assumption of mine is that once machine guns became common, the traditional way of turning small advantages into breakthroughs and decisive victories by pursuing with fast-moving cavalry became untenable. We got trenches in WWI because there wasn’t a way to exploit breakthroughs until the tank was invented – something fast moving that could stand up to machine guns. Since tanks seem utterly unviable with a fossil-fuel driven industrial base, the ongoing use of machine guns or lack thereof seems like a pretty important hinge on which future military tactics will turn.
Oh, and as a P.S., my copy of The Social History of the Machine Gun just arrived last night, so if your answer is “go read that, it will tell you what you need to know,” fair enough!
Thanks very much for this space and everything else you do,
Jeff
Also, my good friend Jugular Jones recently returned to the WAIF studios to fill in for his friend Ken Katkin on Trash Flow Radio. The set is available to stream or download now for those who would like a slice of “omnipunk” to go along with your Fourth of July preparations.
The first set features a lot of great music from Japan, followed by music from throughout North America + Cornwall & Italy, Ireland & elsewhere, as well as two local Cincinnati bands…
“On Sat June 3, DJ Jugular Jones returned to Trash Flow Radio to host an “omnipunk” special, featuring ambient and out-sounds from Shizuka, Les Rallizes Denudes, “Insane Japanese Rocker,” Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Ghost, Sulis Noctis, Musel, Tele Novella, Meg Baird, The Tear Garden, Lankum, Big Blood, Wednesday, Norma Tanega, Freakwater, The Residents, Nocturnal Emissions & Barnacles, Enkardios, Chrome Cranks, Human Impact, Mogwai, and Mourn. DJ Jugular Jones always does a great show, and this one was no exception.
As usual, you can stream or download the June 3 episode, ad-free, in ONE part, from:
Stream: Trash Flow Radio June 03, 2023 (DJ Jugular Jones Omnipunk Special) (117 mins):
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Download: Trash Flow Radio June 03, 2023 (DJ Jugular Jones Omnipunk Special) (117 mins | 107 MB):
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Playlist for Trash Flow Radio — June 03, 2023 (DJ Jugular Jones Omnipunk Special):
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Stay Radio Active!
JMG,
I really enjoyed your works regarding collapse and also retrotopia and stars reach and have been reading learning ritual magic. This weekend I picked up Innsmouth and was pleasantly surprised! Will be getting the rest of the series shortly.
The Ecosophian Public Divination Service has opened another space for free readings, so if you have a question, a situation you would like to know more about or just a general ‘what’s up in the Astral Light for me’ well hit me up in the comment section over at my journal and I’ll ask my Tarot or use Geomancy (or both) to answer it.
Divination Offering
Some might find this interesting: https://hackaday.com/2023/06/27/wind-to-heat-a-lot-of-hot-air/
I am not affiliated with the author of that post.
@patricia Ormsby (hope that’s spelled right) and/or other Japan based ecosophian’s
Hello!
It appears within in the next couple years I’ll have an opportunity for a week long ish trip to Japan, im especially interested in seeing a Shinto ceremony in whatever respectful capacity a non-Japanese speaking traveling western polytheist can. Others going on the trip with me wanna go to Tokyo Disneyland (meh) akihabara (many of us love anime and manga) the ghibli theme park, and Kyoto to give you a potential general shape of the trip.
Any advice about how to do so, where to go, and what to expect?
And any advice about traveling in Japan, general recommendations and such will be much appreciated!
Thanks All,
-WindMan
JMG
Today as I sit on the patio having lunch, I notice that the air smells like a poorly tended campfire. I imagine this is the case for much of North America.
I believe that you addressed this phenomenon with regard to California some time ago. Decades of aggressive firefighting allowing fuel to build up, followed by funding cuts and climate variations leading to spectacular conflagrations. At least that is my assumption with regards to Canada’s current situation. Interesting times.
So do you think that Joe Biden will be in any sort of shape to run for president as the incumbent in 2024? A lot of people don’t think so and are speculating that California governor Gavin Newsom will step into the role.
@Chuaquin, JMG, Sctolyn:
You recently brought up the subject of psychoanalysis in the last post, with its status as a science being a contested one.
I’d again like to defend it against a view that dismisses it as a part of medicine or, even worse, some kind of expert-driven reeducation:
According to Lacan, the analyst knows nothing. The analysant is doing the analyzing – a scientist on his own case – through the analyst, who is impersonating a “thought-conducting material” for the analysant. If the analyst steps out of this role into the role of psychotherapist, lifecoach or doctor, attempting expert “treatment”, the analysis stalls.
I once had a life-changing long after my own analysis had been concluded when, after half a year of considerable agony, in my desperation I opened a book on psychoanalysis – which, on the face of it, should resulted in failure, precisely because it was merely ‘on’ psychoanalysis.
Starting to read the first lines, I was struck by how much material I immediately started producing – the book at that moment became an able replacement for an analyst because I’d completed the role of analysant.
A day later – I’d only read a few lines by then – suddenly a specific sentence formed in my head, my heart rate immediately normalized, and I’d achieved a breakthrough which has shaped my life ever since.
Not sure if you follow Simplicius76 as an analyst for the Russo-Ukraine war. He does pretty regular updates on his blog that I find to be fairly solid. Anyway, in his most recent analysis, towards the end, he touches back on the strange Wagner/Prighozin saga and says something that I found absolutely fascinating in light of the remarks you’ve made about the rising current of a new great culture centered in Russia.
“In fact, something very interesting is happening inside Russia. There is an energy, a vitality and solidarity that’s rising like never before. People are animated with a renewed sense of purpose, patriotism, and love for their country. Patrick Lancaster’s new report captures some of this”
“It may seem confusing to the outside observer at first, because Russia has always been the infamous mystery wrapped in an enigma. But listen to the people’s voices, they are cheering for Wagner while simultaneously praising Putin and Russia with a newfound optimism for destiny, rather than the fatalism of the 90s. It’s captured even in the spirit of the lonesome street sweeper, who intimates that everything is going exactly according to plan for Russia, in the midst of what appeared like an armed rebellion”
“Can Americans understand such things? Perhaps only those who’ve read Dostoevsky.
This is a new Russia being born before our very eyes, with each hitch, like that of yesterday, merely serving as the birthing pangs of a new actualization of Russia’s historical purpose”
HV
JMG, do you put much stock in Gnosticism, specifically, the idea that creation of the material world (and us) may have been a cosmic accident and that we’re repressed by a crappy demiurge & archons, or something along those lines? Would like to get your view on if there are spiritual / esoteric forces that are working against us…gracias amigo
JMG:
I have been thinking about the mental sheath (re: “On Magic, Manhood, and Masculinism”). I think I follow you on the differences between the male and female etheric and astral bodies, but I don’t understand the difference between a male and a female mental sheath. Although I may not fully understand what is going on at the level of the mental sheath for that matter. Any further guidance is welcome.
Dear JMG,
You have written about the value of memory training in the past, and I wonder if you’d be willing to suggest one or two methods or books you find valuable.
Thank you.
Tim PW
Justin #22, that’s the less efficient way to use wind power directly. The more comprehensive version is to use direct drive to compress air. That generates heat which can then be tapped. The compressed air is stored until it’s used for mechanical drive (or maybe paint guns or something). The expansion of the compressed air has a cooling effect in turn, which depending on the application, may also be usable (eg fridge powered by an air motor that also directly helps with cooling).
Looking for hopeful towns
I’ve been in Rhode Island for a few days now, and one thing I immediately noticed landing in Boston was the improvement in vibes from Seattle. I know some people don’t think highly of Boston, so… that gives me something to measure against. Then in RI things were even better and it got me thinking.
What is this vibe that I loathe so much back in Seattle? Given the contrast that I had the opportunity of making use, specially after checking out the WaterFire I think it is that RI hasn’t been taken over by the hyper-commercialized, bureaucratic, steel-cold, mindless abusive trance of the corporate world. There is still life in here, it still has the vibe of a city that hasn’t been uploaded to the web completely while the well to do look down on everyone else from up their neatly closed environment-castles we call corporate towers and apartment high-rises and laugh it out while everybody else is drowned by the pot-infused septic vibes down below.
With that said, I figured this might be the right place to ask. What are some states and towns that have been kept up better and still have nice ~vibes~ around them? Rhode Island is an option, I checked out some of the neighborhoods (that I can afford to live on) and, surprisingly, even some of them reminded me of home. It’s been my first time in a dollar store that I found in East Providence and I loved it (it’s just that back in Mexico we just call them, well, stores).
So, dear ecosophians. Do you like the town that you live on? What vibes does it have? Where would you move if you needed to?
Replying to Alan, #11. I suspect there is more than one answer.
In the first place, I suspect that the push to conform is somehow biologically embedded in us, because we are a social animal (like ants or bees) and so there is a survival value to aligning with our peers.
But some people clearly don’t feel the push as strongly as others, and probably there are several reasons. (1) A few people may simply not detect the social signals very well or very strongly. (2) Others may be too wrapped up in their own interests and passions to bother noticing what the social signals are saying. (3) Yet another group may be those who have been badly treated by the social community, and who therefore step back because they feel alienated from it.
I’m sure these three categories are not discrete. Also, there are doubtless others that I have missed. But in any event, I think that the thing which has to be explained is NON-conformity, because I think that conformity itself is the default state for biological reasons.
Alex, that’s a fascinating and complex question. Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy belongs on that list, and so does On the Mysteries by Iamblichus; I’d also include the Picatrix — but beyond that, hmm. I’m going to think about that, and consider a future post either here or on my Dreamwidth journal.
Luke, thanks for this.
Katherine, you’re welcome and thank you!
Yiğit, the most important thing Western society has to pass onto the future is experimental science — not its findings, but the scientific method itself. Everything else is secondary. As for the Second Religiosity, why, it depends entirely on personal factors such as your own attitude toward religion. I’m sorry to say that I know very little about Turkish language and literature, so I may not be the right person to ask!
Enjoyer, a lot of us in the peak oil scene were blindsided by the fracking boom, because it makes no economic sense — the cost of fracked oil, when everything is accounted for, is high enough that it’s not really economically viable. What few of us realized — it was 2008 or so before I caught on — is that a country that’s willing to spin the presses and manufacture money in ever-growing amounts can ignore economics, for a while. Conventional oil production peaked and decline as predicted, but the industrial world — and especially the US — responded by drawing down every other available source of liquid fuels, and ignoring the cost. That’s why the US economy is falling apart, why infrastructure is being handed over to malign neglect at an ever-increasing speed, the number of homeless people is soaring, and our cities increasingly look like Third World slums: every year, more and more of our economic activity goes to prop up the liquid fuel industry. How long will that continue? Until something else breaks.
Gregsimay, yes, I know Dr. Stephen Greer is peddling that particular snake oil these days. I’m sure he can count on large audiences, for the same reason that anybody who promises free goodies will always find fools who can be parted with their money. The “seething quantum vacuum” is literally the zero point, the lowest point on the energy curve, and you can’t extract energy from that — it’s like insisting that water will flow uphill if you really, really want it to. Arthur Eddington’s quote remains apposite: “The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
And of course it’s also the case that humans gonna human. If Dr. Greer got some kind of vast bonanza, I doubt he’d deal with it much better than industrial civilization did; for that matter, I’m far from sure that I’d manage such a thing especially well.
Yorkshire, interesting. Possibly so, but I’m not sure that would occur to any of my protagonists — or, for that matter, to the Great Old Ones.
Viduraawakened, (1) that’s a very complex question and one that I’m still working out for the novel. Stay tuned! 😉 (2) Basically, yes. Past performance is no guide to future results on the small scale; step back far enough to see the overall patterns, and they repeat reliably.
Clay, well, yes, that’s Nicholas Kristof. I’m sure he sleeps very well; the first thing a really consummate propagandist must do is convince himself.
Alan, hmm. That’s a fascinating question; I’ll put some thought into it.
Helix, that sort of thing has been rehashed in bad science fiction for well over a century. My guess is that it’ll never happen because of the raw unpredictability of the results. I’m reminded of the recent simulation test of an AI system for using drones to blow up targets; the AI had to get approval from a human operator before proceeding, and the human occasionally ruled this or that target out of bounds, so the AI used a missile to blow up the human operatore so it could keep on scoring points. When the simulation was stopped and a command was put in telling the AI not to blow up the operator, it proceeded to blow up the radio antenna he was using to send messages to the AI. That is to say, within a few days of the system you’ve described being put into place, the AI would figure out that the main source of wrongthink in society was the bad choices being made by the ruling elite, and the robocops would show up at Bill Gates’ front door!
Clarke, thanks for this. Portability has plenty of advantages even for those who don’t have difficult horoscopes; that’s why the system of occult training in my book The Way of the Golden Section and its sequels is designed to have extremely modest requirements for space and equipment.
Mary, if an attempt is made to disband the CIA, it’ll be interesting to see whether it goes as smoothly as all that.
Rajarshi, many thanks for this! With regard to my fiction, it’s up to the publisher where the books go, not up to the author. I have no idea how Google deals with publishers. You might considering contacting Sphinx Books, the new publisher of my fiction — their website is https://www.sphinxbooks.co.uk/ — and seeing whether there’s a venue they recommend.
Justin, thanks for this.
Siliconguy, and thanks for this. Real world data like this is a great counterbalance to green fantasies.
Jeff, that’s an intriguing question. Mobile artillery was at least as significant as machine guns in reducing the usefulness of cavalry — the US Civil War is a good source of data here, since machine guns were in their infancy (and not really effective) but field artillery was mature and brutally effective; cavalry had an important role in the war — look up the career of Benjamin Grierson sometime — but not in the battlefield role it had once had. Whether or not machine guns will be viable over the long term, field artillery certainly will. I imagine the successful armies of the deindustrial era as resembling early 19th century armies, mostly infantry carrying firearms, with field artillery and cavalry scouts, but also with ultralight aircraft (powered by alcohol fuel) and radio communications cutting into the fog of war. But more on this when deindustrial military history has its Fifth Wednesday!
Jose, I’m delighted to hear it. I had a lot of fun writing the series — and you’ll notice some common ground between it and my nonfiction as the story unfolds.
Justin, good heavens. That’s very clever — and because energy always likes to turn into low-grade waste heat, it’s likely to be very efficient.
Piper, it’s more than that. As the climate warms, the western half of North America is turning into desert — that always happens in warm cycles — and much of what’s now woodland in the central part of the continent is turning into grassland. In both cases there’s a lot of biomass in the form of trees, and nature is removing it in the usual way. Meanwhile the growing season in Siberia is getting longer — Russia had its largest ever wheat crop last year — and we’re not too far away from the point at which monsoon rains start falling in the Sahara and the Arabian desert, transforming those to grasslands. Welcome to the future!
Mr. Nobody, the Democrats are clearly in a blind panic over Biden’s plummeting chances of reelection. It doesn’t help that Harris is the least popular vice president since records started being kept! So it’s quite possible that some gimmick will be found to put Newsom, or Illinois governor Pritzker, or some other less obviously foredoomed candidate in place of Biden. One way or another, go long on popcorn futures!
Michaelz, there are at least two phenomena at work here. One is psychoanalysis in theory; the other is psychoanalysis in practice. It’s not quite fair to compare those to Marxism in theory and practice, but the difference is not as broad as one would like. Most psychoanalysts these days follow the disease maintenance approach, in which dependence on the therapist is encouraged, a patient cured is a customer lost, and stringing the patient out as long as possible for weekly sessions that don’t solve the problem is standard practice. (That’s standard in the entire medical profession these days, to be sure, but psychoanalysts were early adopters.) That’s not inherent in the analytic practice, of course, and there are noble exceptions, but it’s painfully common. That said, there’s potentially a very promising future for psychoanalysis, once it stops being the preserve of a self-perpetuating expert class focused on making a living from the work. A century ago, lay psychoanalysts were common, and occult correspondence courses taught people how to do the “talking cure” with their friends and family; returning to that model is likely to see much better results.
HippieViking, I do indeed follow Simplicius — he’s one of the best writers on the subject — and I noted that passage with fascination. We may be seeing the first stirrings of the future Russian great culture, with the Ukraine war playing the same role that Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at the battle of Tours played in the genesis of the Faustian great culture.
Dusan, no, I’m involved in the other wing of Gnosticism — the one that sees everything as part of a cosmic dance, always moving the way it should. There are certainly metaphysical forces at work making life difficult for us just now, but most of those are produced by our own mishandling of life, and the rest wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t give them ample room to mess with us.
Christopher, that’s not surprising, as the mental sheath is very poorly developed yet in most of us. One example that can help is creative inspiration. If you read the biographies of many male artists and writers, you’ll find that they need to be in love to create. Richard Wagner’s one example of many; when he set out to write an opera, he inevitably fell in love with somebody, and the affair lasted until the opera finished. (His wife, who had been one of his early inspirations, used to send letters to his lady friend du jour suggesting things to say and do that would keep him in a creative fever.) Few female artists and writers have this same need; what they need is to feel that their work is reaching someone. The difference is in the mental body; most men have a female mental body, which needs some outside source of inspiration to tap into the sources of creativity and meaning; most women have a male mental body, which needs to inspire rather than to be inspired.
Tim PW, here’s a good intro, with bibliography.
Augusto, well, you know what I think on that subject. 😉
Hello JMG and kommentariat! How do you do?
I’ve seen in the www that the Chinese are trying to go ahead in nuclear fission with thorium (1st commercial reactor, according some news, or maybe propaganda, I don’t know), which is a more abundant than uranium, and cheaper, and safer…
https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/worlds-first-commercial-thorium-reactor-approved-in-china/
What do you think about that news, are they mere propaganda for the China regime, or are they making a true technology? And if it’s a true (and cheap) technology, I wonder what influence could have on “peak everything”. Because thorium can be more abundant than uranium, but it must have its peak too…I have my doubts on it.
Oh, and they say that cannot be used to make nukes…What a relief (ironic mood).
Just in time for the WoH reissues, Michelle Askew recounts an experience of a ‘Lovecraftian’ entity, possibly a tree-spirit, in Liverpool’s Green Park:
“As I walked around the park soaking up the atmosphere and the scents of mid-summer nature I noticed a small figure dressed in black standing by a tree, as I got closer to the tree, right in front of me the figure morphed into a strange looking creature. I blinked hard thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me, the creature/entity was still there and it began to wrap its arms around the tree which now resembled tentacles and began to climb it. Out of sheer shock I ran out of the park and as I ran out of the park a bat nearly flew into me, as you can imagine this added to the spookiness of what I had just witnessed. Never in my life have I ever seen anything like it, whatever it was I feel was an otherworldly entity just doing its thing but one thing is for sure it was really connected to trees. Which are considered ‘the lungs’ of planet earth.”
Read the rest here: https://michelleaskew.substack.com/p/lovecraftian-entity-spotted-in-norris
I shall wear it as a badge of honour that I have a mind so alien, even the Great Old Ones would think my plans insane.
@JMG #34 re: Machine Guns and Field Artillery
Thanks very much, that’s not too far from where I was starting to speculate, but my knowledge of 19th century warfare is pretty cursory thus far, and I didn’t know how much of a difference in impact on cavalry there was between early-to-mid 19th century field artillery (highly mobile, non-TNT) and the later 19th to early 20th century (massed, no-line-of-sight needed, high-explosive), other than the very gross observation “Cavalry declined in prominence throughout the century.”
To start to correct this, I’ve recently picked up Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon and Esposito’s A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars to start boning up on the Napoleonic Wars. Do you or the commentariat have any recommendations for best overall one or two books on the American Civil War? I suppose it might be worth looking at the Franco-Prussian Wars as well.
Also, as a comment: it strikes me that wargaming might be a really useful way to explore what impact better communications and observation provided by radio and aircraft might do with otherwise roughly 19th century military technology, since most games have to be designed specifically to compensate for the fact that you don’t have real fog of war in a board game. I’m imagining something like a paired set of games: 1) a kriegspiel-like set up where each major battlefield command is controlled by a different player, and the main commander has to send written orders to them, and pieces are kept off the board or at least face down until closely observed, and then 2) a second game much like the first, except commanders on the same side can freely talk and they have aircraft that can reveal the obscured enemy pieces. I assume the differences would be instructive, to say the least!
No questions, just some recent photos of my garden:
https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/93979.html
Hippie Viking, I can tell you what’s animating Russia. They finally live in what they wanted which they called a “normal country.” My cousins in Moscow can now walk to a supermarket (they use the American term) and buy anything they want, instead of standing in line for hours to get some rare item in the former “worker’s paradise.” They can also freely travel overseas which they do often with a preference for Cyprus.
Hello John and others,
I first wanted to express my gratitude to your blog. I have listened to you on and off for a few years but have regrettably never ventured to Ecosophia until very recently and I must say that your chapter by chapter exegesis of Levi’s Transcendental Magic has been very illuminating.
Since I am new here I am not entirely sure how this works but my question is two-fold and relates to the practice of Tattwa scrying as taught by GD. One of my concerns is about intent and the other is about discernment.
Just a bit of background, I have not ventured all the way through the GD system (due to time and practical considerations) but I am incorporating daily LBRP opening and closing rituals into my nightly Tattwa practice.
The first part of my question would be: should one have a specific intention in mind before sitting down with the Tattwa card that is complimentary to its elemental persuasion? A lot of what I have read about Tattwa scrying seems to be exploratory and almost journey-like, so I guess I am asking whether to treat it as a more traditional magical ritual or to just let it take you wherever you need to go?
The other part of my question is: how does one discern whether specific images are relevant to the Tattwa or not? I have a very active visual imagination to the point where I can close my eyes right now and see closed eye visualizations. So when confronted with a phantasmagoria of images while practicing Tattwa scrying how do you discern what is important and what can be thrown away?
All the best John and others!
To the commentariat: Any good reading resources you’d recommend on altered states of consciousness? I’ve perused a lot the literature on psychedelics, but I’m more interested in work done on the subject that addresses it from all the *other* possible angles: meditation, neurology, altered states in brain damage and epilepsy, but also… anything that addresses the question of where, exactly, you go when you successfully exit your head during meditation? Anything a regular joe should know about that space? Who talks about this? I feel like I could find it if I had even a vocabulary to talk about it. Ideas? Books? What’s out there that isn’t completely loopy?
Hosea #27,
I don’t think there is as much biological cause for humans to conform or obey as you suggest. It is certainly much weaker than in ants. Just like biological cause to be monogamous is much weaker in humans than in swans. Consider extramarital affairs in Ancient Greece, which literature suggests were common even though they could be punished by death. People even have some biological cause to disobey, because people enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes up when they take actions under the risk of getting caught.
On the other hand, many people don’t see any reason to choose to disobey if they had always been surrounded by values that reinforce what they choose to obey. Consider human sacrifice victims, who often performed part of the ceremony that killed them, or societies where people were expected to commit suicide in certain circumstances. The people involved would not have latched on to the fear of the horrible end if they had not had reason to see anything wrong with these rules or the circumstances.
I think the perception right now that people are cowering too much is related to there being information disparities that make a situation look more dangerous closer to the situation than further away from it. People will always make calculations predicting the likely outcome of an action and choose the outcome they would prefer. If they can not, from their standpoint close to the situation, predict an outcome of “weaken the evil oppressor”, they will not necessary make an obviously defiant gesture.
@Augusto (#32):
In New England, the “vibes” are quite different in different places, and the differences go back to the 1600s. If you’re exploring the region for a place to settle in, the following capsule history of may help you decide.
The old Puritan colonies — Massachusetts, except for its “South Shore,” and Connecticut (including the originally distinct colony of New Haven) — soon became the economic powerhouses of the region, and they have been the most densely urbanized.
The “Northern Fringe” of New England — New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont — are still not all that heavily urbanized at all, with the exception of a few old seaports. That’s the best part of New England if one loves to hunt or fish or trap, or simply to live a self-reliant life out in the wild. The Puritan influence was never very strong in the Northern Fringe of New England, and it still shows. There’s a famous anecdote about a Puritan preacher from Massachusetts who was passing through Portsmouth, NH, and gave a sermon at a local church. Among other things, he extolled the Puritan form of Protestantism, and claimed that “our ancestors came to New England for the freedom to practice the true Puritan religion.” At that point, a grizzled old man stood up and interrupted the sermon: “That may be why your ancestors came here, Preacher. Our ancestors came here to fish and trade, and not for religion at all.”
What is now the “South Shore” of Massachussets was originally not part of Massachusetts, but a colony in its own right (Plymouth), and its first settlers were not Puritans al all, but Separatists — a far more radical sort of Protestant, and more individualistic than the community-minded Puritans. Plymouth Colony was seized by Massachusetts in the early 1690s, but its inhabitants never became as community-minded or Puritanical as in Massachusetts.
And then there is Rhode Island, the hallmark of which was toleration of every sort of religion and irreligion, with total separation of church and state. (But not all of what is now the state of Rhode Island was originally part of the old united colony of “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” Most of the eastern side of Narragansett Bay was originally part of Plymouth Colony.)
@Jeff Russel, JMG
I agree that you need don’t need machine guns to fall into trench warfare, if by “machine guns” you mean fully-automatic repeating rifles like the Maxim. I think semiautomatic repeating rifles, or even fast bolt-action rifles will do. Once men get into trenches, they are by all accounts very hard to tease out. There was even some trench fighting in the US Civil War, was there not? I don’t know on the balance how much of that had to do with the field artillery vs massed rifle fire. (Field artillery is death to horses and men in the open, but not particularly useful in the trenches, as was found in 1914.)
I have my doubts we’ll see many machine guns going through the next dark age. Nothing like the absolute dominance they have now, anyway! IMO, the whole future of war is going to be a story of “shell hunger,” down to the bullets for your maxim gun. One source of the hunger is of course producing the prodigious amounts of brass-and-lead cartridges such a gun requires. (Though the Mitrailleuse and Gatling Gun, IIRC did not require brass) — two is the nitrates. How deindustrial are we imagining the deindustrial future will get? Because the Haber-Bosch process is pretty darned industrial, and takes a lot of energy. Without that source of artificial nitrates for explosives, well. There’s only so much cow pee in Flanders. (Or anywhere else, for that matter.)
If you are firing that nitrogen off as gunpowder, it’s not going on your crops; gunpowder war becomes rather a pyrrhic affair, in that case, I think. WWI could not be maintained without famine. Even a conflict of the scale and intensity of the Civil War would, IMO, be pushing it. Both the grey and the blue depended on guano deposits now long gone, after all.
My vision of the future of war actually has a lot in common with the late Renaissance/Early Modern Era, though not in any technological detail. (Technologically, I suspect JMG has the right of it.) I mean that when defense is much easier than offence, war becomes a series of sieges with very few set-piece battles. (If in the future sieges are of trench lines as much as cities and fortifications, unlike the Renaissance, the principle stands.) Set-piece battles can become even harder to arrange when both sides have ultralight aircraft for long-range recon, as JMG points out. (Provided they have no desire to meet and be slaughtered in the open by quick-fire guns and rifles, that is.)
I can easily imagine a bunch of city states which only change hands through treachery or lightning raids getting in the gates/trenchworks before the defending force is called out. Very Italianate.
This implies to me (though by no means guarantees) that Wagner may be the future, since the era I’m picturing as our model was chock full of mercenary forces. The levée en masse is great when you can put a musket in the hands of every Jacques and point him at the enemy, but in an era of shell hunger and repeating rifles you need every shot to count. That means you need small, professional forces…and so often through history, that has meant condottieri, Landsknecht, or sellswords by some other name. It doesn’t have to, mind you, it just seems to work out that way tolerably often.
According to the news this long holiday weekend is being plagued with another deluge of canceled and delayed airline flights, similar to what happened over Christmas. Of course the media and any officials involved always have some sort of excuse such as ” thunderstorms”, or ” lack of air traffic controllers” but what none of them admit is that ( or even accept) air travel for the masses is quickly collapsing before our eyes. This mode of travel is very energy, and capital intensive and todays high and only going higher oil prices are making air travel increasingly unprofitable for the airlines. They have compensated by squeezing seats together, cutting out food, reducing crew size, and selling most of the luggage compartment out for air freight. But the easy cost reductions are gone.
As they are starved of profit all their resiliency is lost. The tiniest disruption sends their system in to a flat spin disrupting thousands of flights. There is no hope for them to fix this as more volume only makes things worse and less volume also makes it worse. Also it did not help that they Vaxxed up all the pilots, and spend 20 driving pilot wages in to the ditch.
You should quickly arrange your life and your work so you do. not need to depend on air travel. This has been made very difficult by our 70 year neglect of passenger rail, but it is probably to late to fix that as well.
By the way, there will be no Battery Planes, the physics don’t work period.
@Hosea Tanatu (#33):
I think it’s not always simply determined by the circumstances of one’s own (early) life. There seems also to be some sort of inheritable (that is, genetic) propensity to be a non-conformist, which some lines of descent may exhibit for many generations. I see it in one of my own lines of descent, going as far back as my earliest immigrant ancestor in the early 1600s.
Chuaquin, oh, everybody tries thorium reactors sooner or later. As long as you don’t take the time to think through the economics of nuclear power, it seems to make sense — and nuclear physicists seem to be incapable of understanding economics. I’d hate to have to balance their checkbooks!
Luke, thanks for this. Clearly things are waking up from their long sleep…
Yorkshire, by all means.
Jeff, I don’t have a book in mind on the entire civil war, but Dee Brown’s Grierson’s Raid — a discussion of the specific campaign I mentioned — is a good lively account of the use of cavalry in the Civil War, and gives a good overview of the military technologies in general. Your kriegsspiel proposal sounds fascinating and I hope you give it a try.
Kimberly, thanks for this.
Cagliostro, scrying in the spirit vision — with tattwas or with any other focus — is meant to be exploratory, not the working out of a specific intention. You’re doing it to develop the capacity to perceive and understand the nonphysical dimensions of the cosmos. As for whether the images are relevant, don’t worry about that. Write down everything you perceive without passing judgment on it. Then, between scryings, meditate on what you see using discursive meditation; here’s a set of instructions in case that isn’t a technique you know. Treat what you see like dream images to be interpreted and understood, and you’ll get the most out of the experience.
Methylethyl, I’ll be interested to see what people suggest.
Clay, exactly. That, plus the state of our cities, plus any number of other indications show that the Long Descent is picking up speed very quickly just now.
@JMG
That’s exactly what I was trying to illustrate, using “sensory data”. Becoming ‘conductive’ through personal experience is the only way to legitimize oneself to become analyst.
Incidentally, that’s not what I myself became. I’m doing something far less glamorous these days, but my abilities are an invaluable asset and I’ve dodged a bullet I could already see being fired back then:
Most of my work would have involved mostly well-off, privileged people unable to develop this kind of ethical stance, i.e. clients, not analysants.
I’m planning on getting into Astrology more seriously going forward, and I also have a hankering to practice certain programming skills. I intend to make an day planner/agenda that will give me the Planetary Hours at a given location (mine!) each day for a year or so, along with what planets are in retrograde. (That’s all I know enough to worry about right now!)
Two questions:
1) Is precalculating this and writing it down going to “queer the pitch” as it were? I know you’ve said for mundane astrology charts can’t be cast too far in advance, but that’s just because you need to know circumstances to interpret them, right? (I mean, I’m pretty sure that astrological hours calculator online is just looking up an ephemeris, too… but I don’t know what I don’t know!)
2) What else would you (and this is the collective “you,” everyone!) recommend including in such a day planner? I hope to get into Astrology-as-divination further as the year goes on and I don’t want to be cursing myself for not including more information down the road.
If the project turns out nicely, I may make these planners available in PDF or printed form, but I am NOT advertising. (Right now, anyway). If there’s interest I might be persuaded to make these for other humans for their home base location, and will announce that on this list in a month or two IFF it doesn’t violate our host’s rule on sales spam.
For what it’s worth: at the White House press conference, Indian PM Modi wore Hindu dress, not a suit and tie. Chinese leaders seem to have adopted the Western suit and tie as opposed to the Chairman Mao style. But then, so does Putin. Both state, loud and clear, “We are not the old Communist regime.”
Meanwhile: DeSanti’s law forbidding colleges to spend money on race and gender studies requires a curriculum “focused on Western European civilization.” On immigration, legal and illegal, he’s cracking down harder than Trump. Hotels, restaurants, farmers, and construction forms are screaming bloody murder at the need to eVerify their workers. “Now all the truth is out…..”
He’s also taken aim at allowing China to send packages worth less than $800 and addressed to individuals to escape tariffs – would lower that to nearer $100 if President. However, we’re getting cheap fast fashions made in Cambodia, in Haiti (!)…(Personal: wanted, a source of well-made all-cotton tee shirts made in the US in some fairly attractive colors – my old ones are getting very threadbare. Have almost zero access to thrift shops.)
Robert Mathiesen
Apropos your comment in the last blog about Russia and Ukraine being separate countries, which country do you feel Donbas, Crimea, Odessa and Kharkov are inherently part of? I never thought about it before 2014, but since then have always assumed they were part of Russia, and that Western Ukraine, which was certainly another country, was attacking to Ukrainize them. you obviously know a great deal more than i do about it, so I would appreciate your answer.
Jeff & JMG
I guess this was what you meant by post industrial, but the machine gun ammunition has to be manufactured to very fine tolerances to keep from jamming. Even a clip or magazine loaded ammunition can get away with la bit less. A machine gun sure goes through a lot of it too.
Stephen
Thank you for your answers to my questions John Michael Greer, when I say literature advice, what advice can you have for a Literature student in general, not specifically (you like to read a lot of books) so I thought I’d get some advice, thank you again! Good weeks
I was going to post this on the new Cooties post, but I think it’s maybe better here.
I try to watch whatever VSRF (Vaccine Safety Research Foundation) posts on Thursdays. Three weeks ago they interviewed Mattias Desmet about his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism. I found it fascinating, and even watched his interview with Tucker Carlson, which was also very good. I ended up buying his book.
And WOW! He covers a lot of ground and I really enjoyed it. It’s a little scary because he talks about “mass formation” and how humans can detach from their ethics and each other in pursuit of the collective narrative, to the point of not tolerating dissent even if that means killing those who aren’t part of the group. I wish everyone would read and understand this book so we could be on the lookout and maybe try to keep it from getting that bad next time.
He uses a lot of examples from Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, but there are a lot of examples from the last three years of Cooties Mania, being the most recent example.
I know I’m late to the party. I think the book came out in the fall/winter of 2021. But if you haven’t read it yet, and if you’re a fan of this blog, I think you would like it. Maybe one of you has read it and can back me up on this. I even have the temerity to suggest it to JMG himself, if you haven’t read it already.
Anyway, if you’re wondering why people are behaving so strangely, this is at least one part of the puzzle.
Jeff
I felt a novel that gave a good feel for the civil war tactics and equipment was Michael Shaara’s The KiIler Angels.
He also points out in that book, that the cavalry was already stopping using sabers, and was functioning as either scouts or dragoons.
Stephen
Just an anecdote from a proud father.
Dutch elementary school children are exposed daily to something called “news for the youth” (jeugdjournaal). It is like the news, but tailored to a younger audience – in theory.
In practice, it is appallingly superficial, unashamedly biased towards what passes for left-wing today, and often just plain wrong (in the explanation of WWI, Italy, Germany and Austria fought on the same side).
Yesterday my 12-year old son, commenting casually on the jeugdjournaal, said “it is just propaganda, they only tell lies. It is all staged”.
I did not even know they he knew the word “propaganda”, let alone that he could apply it correctly.
For Alan or anyone else who’s interested in studying the roots of nonconformity, you might want to look into some of the literature and first-person accounts of people who have chosen to leave insular religious communities.
I suggest that area, because it’s one of the few natural experiments we have. Various social scientists have done lab-based experiments to measure levels of conformity vs. nonconformity in artificial settings, but I don’t know of any studies that followed up on WHY some people didn’t conform. Books and websites by and about people who left insular religious communities (like ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects and isolationist Christian fundamentalist/quiverfull communities, for example), on the other hand, often feature discussion of why people left – these communities are not easy to exit – and may give you some insights into what the apostates had in common.
People leaving conservative religions aren’t as much of a stretch as some might think, given how utterly cult-like devotees of The Science and its covid narrative have been. You might start tracking down and reading some of the books and blogs from those kinds of people, and see where it takes you.
@Chicory Omnibus #43,
Yes, I readily accept that the picture is subtler than I described. I was painting in broad brush strokes to indicate the overall shape of my idea, but clearly you are right that the pro-social instinct in humans is a lot more nuanced than it is in ants. (At the same time, E. O. Wilson did once remark that the reason humans have been so successful is our “eusociality,” and he drew a direct comparison to ants who have been similarly successful for the same reason. But yes, the details are all different!)
I like your point about information disparities. Earlier today I was suggesting to a dear friend that many so-called “political arguments” are really disagreements about facts, not values. If one person supports (for example) an energy policy that eliminates all fossil fuels tomorrow morning, while another supports a more gradual policy as we begin to run out and the price gets too high, their disagreement is NOT because one of them is evil. It’s because they have made different calculations about how much energy can be extracted from sun and wind (for example) and about how difficult it will be to shift over.
@Robert Mathiesen, #47,
This sounds very likely. When I said that some people just don’t detect social signals very well, I had in mind something analogous to a sensory condition like color-blindness or tone-deafness, where the individual literally doesn’t perceive social signals in the same way that others do. Or perhaps they perceive the signals but just don’t care, which has the same long-term result. Why shouldn’t that tendency have a genetic component? Color-blindness does.
@methylethyl #42 re: Altered States of Consciousness
First a general caveat: I haven’t read all of these books, and when I became interested in them, I had a typically materialist worldview and assumptions, and I didn’t much take possible spiritual risks attending to them seriously. I don’t think that will be a problem for you, but please don’t think these are endorsements so much as leads that might be worth exploring.
1. Passages: A Guide for Pilgrims of the Mind by Marianne S. Andersen – I think the best part of this book is that it gives a lot of different ways to meditate, enter trance, and so forth, with specific, practical instructions. I tried several, got varying results, but nothing that wowed me, and honestly likely didn’t stick with any of them long enough to give a fair shake. One weakness is that if I remember right, it treats all non-normal states of consciousness as “trance,” and seems to assume these are all different ways of getting you to the same state, which doesn’t appear to actually be the case.
2. Holotropic Breathwork by Stanislav Groff – I own this, but haven’t read it, as in between my initial enthusiasm and finding time for reading it, I picked up JMG’s Druid Magic Handbook as a spiritual practice, and he’s been pretty clear on how psychedelics and psychedelic-like experiences pull you in different directions than magic. Groff was an early LSD researcher and later developed a system of specific, controlled hyperventilation that’s purported to produce psychedelic-like changes in consciousness. The few times I tried it (unguided, admittedly), I had some noticeable effects, but nothing that crazy. Groff had some very definite ideas that what psychedelics and breathwork were doing was exploring the human psyche. If I remember right, he had a Jung-inspired view of a definite collective structure of the unconscious, though I don’t remember if he thought were you were “going” somewhere, or if a copy was just built in to everybody’s brain.
3. Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal – Like Passages, this one suffers a bit for trying to create too neat a unified category of “ecstasis” for all non-normal states of consciousness. One thing I very much appreciate about it is the warnings it gives about common failure modes: for example, if you experience oneness with the whole universe, that’s great! Don’t come back and think you’re God’s gift to mankind, though. Got me very excited to try floatation tanks, which turned out to be, you know, nice. An hour in a float tank left me with a nice feeling of mental clarity and ease of concentration comparable to a couple of weeks of consistent 15-20 minute mindfulness meditation, but I’ve had some much more exciting times doing discursive meditation and scrying.
4. Rational Mysticism by John Horgan – The whole point of this book is to try to understand the material processes that accompany various states of non-normal consciousness, while remaining agnostic on any non-material implications. Useful for sharing a lot of the research that’s been done on this stuff, including a fellow in Canada who built a machine that does weird stuff with a helmet that emits EM fields to induce strange states of consciousness. Less useful as a “how to,” and not all that helpful if you don’t much care about the material side of what’s going on.
5. Waking Up by Sam Harris – These days I can’t much recommend this one, but Sam Harris does explain very clearly what he thinks is happening with psychedelics and mindfulness meditation, and what he believes consistent practice of the latter can get you (he now thinks psychedelics are a riskier and less certain path to the good stuff meditation can get you).
6. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan – I haven’t read this one, but my understanding is that he talks to a lot of different folks involved one way or another with psychedelics, with an especial focus on their growing popularity lately as a healing modality (it seems they’re most effective at helping with addictions, though some of the promising early studies have not replicated as conclusively as folks might have hoped). I do know that Pollan’s a good writer and seems to be able to make pretty reasonable recommendations, judging by his books on food that I read years back.
Hope these help!
Jeff
Re: “look up the career of Benjamin Grierson sometime”
Do it the fun way with this little piece by John Dolan, writing in character as Gary Brecher, “The War Nerd”: http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-ben-grierson-actual-hero/
Jonathan.
Here are all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared across the Ecosophia community. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below or in the comment section of the most recent Prayer List post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
It’s a boy! Hippie Viking and his wife are the parents of a new baby; for blessings on the child according to his nature and the nature of the deity prayed to; and for good health for both mother and child. (Original request here)
Tamanous’s friend’s brother David got in a terrible motorcycle accident and has been diagnosed as a quadriplegic given the resultant spinal damage; for healing and the positive outcomes of upcoming surgeries and rehabilitation, specifically towards him being able to walk and live a normal life once more.
Nicole’s (shewhoholdstension) 41 year brother Robert died suddenly in bed on May 15th; for a smooth and blessed journey on the other side. Robert was a single dad and he leaves behind three children: Hannah, Zack, and Jordyn; that they and Nicole be blessed and protected, and find what comfort they can during this very difficult time. (Update here.)
Lp9’s request on behalf of their hometown, East Palestine Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people and all living beings in the area. (Lp9 gives updates here and most recently here, and says “things are a bit… murky”), and the reasonable possibility seems to exist that this is an environmental disaster on par with the worst America has ever seen. At any rate, it is clearly having a devastating impact on the local area, and prayers are still warranted.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are now to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Dear JMG,
since no questions appears to be off limit:
currently I´m an occupational therapist who has among lots of other clients two autist-kids, one who does speak but the diagnosis seems to swing over to ADHD (not sure if I concur) and one who doesn´t speak.
Still since you and some of your audience apparently belong to the wide field of autism afflicted people (sorry if I put this akwardly!) I wonder if there is something that people who experience the hindrances that go with that particular label would (have) like(d) their OT to know?
Especially for the kid without speech? The ears have been found fully functional and this week I´ll start a program that will (hopefully!) help the client to interpret sounds better, so that the few words its got will get more (client is well versed in expressing oneself with gestures and other sounds)
Oh and: if you and/or your commenters are willing: what helped to ameliorate frustrations? (The non-speaking kid as far as I can tell correctly used to getting it´s wishes and if pressed resorts to behaviour that creates social problems – kicking, biting, etc.)
Also: if you already covered the questions elsewhere could you point me there?
Thank you very much!
Well, I suppose I can’t be the only commenter who thinks of a hundred things to say each month, and then forgets them all by the time the monthly post rolls around.
@JMG, what do you think of this, in view of your notion that rural internet access is faltering?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-biden-announces-42-5-billion-plan-to-expand-high-speed-internet-across-u-s#:~:text=Biden%20announced%20that%20more%20than,or%20service%20is%20too%20slow.
I mentioned sometime last year, I guess, that crews have been going round my province installing fibre-op in the most remote of locations. The usual suspects have been wondering if this is in preparation for CBDC rollout, and I can’t say I dismiss it.
As for Kimberley’s bathroom challenge, oh dear, oh goodness me. All I can say is this: please don’t ever make the regrettable mistake of asking a college boy how often he cleans his bathroom. Once, when I was of that age, I asked a friend, in that sotto voce way you do when it’s kind of an awkward question, how often he cleaned his bathroom.
He said: I don’t think I ever have.
It made me feel better about my twice-a-year routine. (Before summer and before Christmas break.)
Do you know any good resources for discussing the Solar and Telluric Currents? Watching how my family insists on covering their skin and hiding from the sun (sunglasses every time they step outside and copious sunscreen), I’ve found it hard to avoid the conclusion they are actively attempting to cut themselves off from the Sun. From here, I started wondering about what kinds of effects a serious imbalance in the direction of the Telluric Current would have; and am wondering if this might be a factor in our society’s current dysfunction.
Re JMG
Yeah, that’s what I thought about the fracking boom. It’s made possible in part by the dollar’s strength, because the government can just print money and ignore economics to finance this nonsense. Either way, peak oil will happen, even if we find tricks to delay it for a little while. Each trick will work worse than the last until the reality of it becomes unavoidable. Also, if the petrodollar collapses, the US might not have many tricks left to use.
In other news, I’ve read your book on UFOs and aliens. Your thesis of the book (if I recall correctly) is that the UFO and alien abduction phenomena are created by a mix of gullible people, government disinformation, and shamanic experiences. Have you heard of the David Grusch situation? Basically he’s a ‘whistleblower’ saying that a secret program in the pentagon is covering up recovered alien craft. UFO ‘whistleblowers’ have been happening for years, but this guy has higher credentials than normal and is being taken seriously by congress for some reason.
Obviously, I don’t believe we’re being visited by aliens from other planets. (Space is really big and traversing it is expensive, to say the least.) So what do you think is going on? What is Grusch trying to do?
@methylethyl (#42):
Here are the books (and one article) I would most strongly recommend for starters:
Andrew Neher, The Psychology of Transcendence, 2nd ed. (Dover, 1990). [Later printings of the same edition have an altered title, Paranormal and Transcendental Experience: A Psychological Examination.]
Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, 2nd ed. (Tarcher, 19890).
Charles T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness,, 3rd ed. (HarperSan Francisco, 1990).
Barbara Lex, “The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance,” The Spectrum of Ritual, edd. Eugene G. d’Aquili et alii (Columbia University Press, 1979), pages 117–151.
J. Finley Hurley, Sorcery (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).
There is a lot more, much of it in the form of academic articles.
Notes:
(1)The volume with the late Barbara Lex’s article is excessively rare, but I have put a copy of her article up on archive.org.
(2) J. Finley Hurley is a pseudonym; the author is a professional forensic psychologist. His book takes the real effectiveness of magic quite seriously, and attempts to explain in mundane terms how this can be so. I think his insights are quite valuable.)
Mr. Greer and company,
I just returned from Los Angeles (visiting family), and they’re constructing apartment buildings like mad at the edge of the inner city I grew up in. They’ve also constructed many stores, restaurants, and even a super market. They’ve been trying to gentrifying the place for decades now, but the city and their developer buddies have been more successful at pushing through changes in the last decade or so.
Also, due to crazy high housing costs, price of fuel, etc., each house contains several more people than I would have seen back in the 90’s, when I was a kid.
I have also heard that many of the far-flung suburbs (e.g. Victorville, Apple Valley) have degenerated into slums, but I have not seen this in person.
From the scraps of data points that I have, I am wondering if this is a general trend: people are leaving the suburbs and flocking to the cores (downtown LA, ports of LA and Long Beach, etc.), often moving in with family that already lives there. Has anyone else noticed this in LA or other cities? FYI, I am Hispanic. Maybe only Hispanic are doing this??
“The words are just confessions of a mask
They sat that thoughts have wings
But our wings have been clipped
The words have gotten in the way
And we are just limping forward
Yet instead of trying to find the thoughts behind the mask
The thoughts that really count without the words
We have fallen for the reflection
The reflection of the shadow of civilization
A civilization that knows no honor
And knows no respect
And knows not its desires or true meaning
A lie within a lie within a lie
The time is long past for a new beginning
The caress within the iron glove.”
–Monte Cazzazza
@Jeff #18 re deindustrialized machine guns: I remember a rollicking good camping weekend with friends in the early 1990s when we practiced shooting plain .22 rifles that one guy had converted to Gatling guns by attaching hand cranks on either side of each gun, and a tripod to balance the gun on a picnic table. No animals or trees were hurt, we had thick targets to shoot at. The faster a person could crank, the faster the gun would shoot. It was great fun, and I don’t believe fossil fuels would be required to do the conversions. Actually, I think fossil fuels would not be necessary to construct one from scratch, though it would take many man hours. I’m not sure if you would include a Gatling gun in your definition of a machine gun, but oh what a fun memory you brought up!
Hi John Michael,
Don’t you think it is weird that the media doesn’t seem to want to report upon the continual expansion of the money supply when it comes to discussing the economics, and not to mention the declining energy per capita? Maybe I expect too much. 🙂 It’s really weird like, there’s this massive blind spot, and if somehow we all pretend it isn’t happening, nothing bad will ever happen. I’m sort of guessing it has a source of cognitive dissonance, and that surely must be driving some of the crazier aspects of our civilisation? Dunno, it’s bonkers really. I’m of the opinion that if feedback is ignored, then poor decision making is rewarded.
Cheers
Chris
Have you been following the ongoing Reddit API fiasco? The company introduced a policy that will radically reduce functionality, but bring huge revenue to the company, and this seems to have set off a major fight. The Reddit user base is up in arms over this, and I can’t help but wonder if this dynamic may drastically accelerate the collapse of the commericial internet: if attempts to increase revenue will risk major conflicts between the company and users, then it may be too risky to try to increase revenue except when absolutely necessary, which is the worst time to try it. These dynamics have occurred before, but it’s always been settled before the protests started to break large parts of the site. It’s interesting to watch this unfold, because it suggests to me that there may not be any kind of clear path towards monetizing the internet we know, and that if and when The Second Dot Com Bubble bursts, an awful lot of things that currently make the internet functional and worth using will end up going away, possibly very, very suddenly.
My Summer Solstice post is focused on a more realistic view of the cosmos and a critique of those who wish to transcend the Earth. It also includes an exploration of orders of magnitude that reveals we’re halfway between protons and light years on an exponential scale.
https://dendroica.substack.com/p/gazing-outward
@gregsimay
My intuitive sense is that some sort of “zero point” energy is possible, but that we really ought not to pursue it until we understand 1) where the energy is actually coming from, and how to use it while maintaining balance in the dance of energy and matter that comprises the universe, and 2) that our living biosphere can only absorb a certain amount of additional energy, and that the ultimate goal must be harmony and equilibrium rather than perpetual growth.
I think that the suppression of such technologies, assuming it is happening, is occurring at a metaphysical level based on the fact that, as you say, discovery of such energy sources at our current level of consciousness would lead to ruin and self-destruction.
@ Augusto
Corvallis, Oregon feels like home to me, and like a place where I plan to stay for a while. If I were to move it would be back to my home region of MN/WI or possibly to the southern Appalachians.
@Kimberly
Your garden looks great!
@epileptic doomer #45 re: Machine Guns and Artillery in the De-Industrial Future
Thanks very much for your reply! You got at much of what was lurking behind my question – specifically, the premise that some historical period would likely prove the best jumping off point for thinking about deindustrial warfare, and from that premise, the thought that a key point would be whether certain pieces of industrially-enabled warfare-changing technology could be modified to be useful in a deindustrial world. So, a few thoughts that your reply brought up:
1. On ACW Trenches: I am also not sure how much of the use of trenches in ACW was due to advances in field artillery, but I believe the minie-ball also had something to do with. Minie-ball ammo was much higher velocity and came out of a rifled barrel, and so you got fire that was more accurate and more deadly, which gave more of an advantage to a side that was settled in and carefully aimed than had been the case with traditional ball bullets. If sitting still was more often worth it, then digging in was more often worth it too. I could be missing something, but I think that was at least part of that dynamic.
2. On Gatling Guns, Cartridges, and Shell Hunger: A quick look at wikipedia says that the initial design used re-usable steel cylinders loaded with cap, powder, and ball. The first production models used paper cartridges, and the wording is a bit confusing, but definitely by 1881 it was taking brass cartridges. Cartridges were the main thing I was thinking about, as all machine guns I’ve ever known are super dependent on an industrial backend – expendable brass cartridges, expendable metal links for the belt, and so forth. Since machine guns were developed in the midst of the industrial revolution really taking off, I don’t think anybody stopped and thought “is there a way we could do this with more human and fewer mechanical inputs?”. Maybe as you say, disciplined, accurate, quick rifle fire will be “close enough” in terms of tactical effects for the point to be moot. One more thing that comes to mind is that “shell hunger” might be more of a tactical consideration – if running out of ammo is a frequent consideration, then melee is likely back on the table as a common element. Maybe limited ammo gets used for suppressing fire in fix-and-flank maneuvers, but the assaulting unit doesn’t shoot, they bayonet.
3. On Gunpowder’s Inputs and Manufacture: Hmm, I didn’t realize that in the ACW guano was a prime input for gunpowder. I knew it was an important economic asset in the late 19th century, but I only associated it with the fertilizer, without making the obvious jump that nitrates are used for both. Three factors I can imagine that might render this less constraining than otherwise: 1) if intensive organic/permaculture agricultural practices persist and are potentially even improved upon, then “pure” nitrates would be less needed for fertilizer, 2) populations will likely be much lower for a long time, which might mean smaller armies with fewer arms, 3) some kind of non-industrial but systematic method of maximizing production might be worked out, like keeping seagulls in cotes or massive bat ranches or something.
4. On Siege Warfare: That’s an excellent point if it does indeed prove true that defense is easier than offense. I think a close look at the early modern period would be warranted here, as fired brick + earthwork fortifications proved very effective against all but the most powerful gunpowder-based shells and bombs, and those are certainly plausible in a deindustrial world. I don’t know what development doomed star forts historically, since forts still had a role, but mostly limited to coastal defense, in the ACW, but not much after that I know of (again, unless you count trench lines and pill boxes and such, which might render my observation about star forts moot).
5. On Condottiere: Hmm, since I had mentally been looking more at late 18th-early 19th century as my primary model (reasoning something like “most of the military technology by before that time could be reproduced non-industrially if someone knew what they were trying to make”), I hadn’t looked as far back as the early modern or Renaissance. I note also that the examples of times where most fighting was done by small, elite bands of sell swords were also associated with small mercantile maritime powers, like the Italian city states or the Netherlands. I wonder if there’s something about that political/social/economic organization that also pushes for that arrangement beyond any technological constraints.
Thanks again for joining me to speculate wildly!
I guess I’m behind the times. I used to think of politics as defined by a Left-Right spectrum, with the Left concerned with issues of breakfast, lunch and dinner, ie material issues, in fact, busting heads over them, fighting tooth and nail, killing multitudes and losing their own lives in the process. A Left-Right line was simple and it made sense, at least to me.
But now it seems that the Left is no longer the Left but rather Progressive, whose main focus is their own status, wealth and power concealed by a thick smog of CRT and race and gender. Oh yeah and global warming, or is it climate change nowadays?
I get confused. I couldn’t tell you what the Right is about anymore, especially when its apparent leader is a liberal (that’s how he looks to me) New York City libertine. Maybe, like Progressives, they’re all about their self-interest hidden by fogbanks of God and guns and guts.
So, what do we use if not a Left-Right horizontal line where we place people and political parties? Is the line obsolete? Is it now a triangle? A circle?
I guess my question is what comes out of this incoherence where people claiming to fight for the oppressed instead fight for their own interests and people who pretend to fight for their country do everything possible to undermine it, of course for their own advantage, and almost always with the complicity of those claiming to be their political opposites?
Maybe it’s not incoherence at all, but rather perfect accord, where the leaders of the Left and the leaders of the Right agree perfectly that the nation state is an asset to be plundered, the only question being division of spoils.
Orwell said something about it being a struggle to see what’s right under your nose so I guess I’m struggling.
JMG,
It seems to me that RFK Jr’s ideas and candidacy aren’t being taken seriously by the mainstream/legacy media. I’ve been on a media fast for the last couple weeks, but before that almost every reference to him that I saw painted him as a crazy, unserious, and ridiculous conspiracy theorist.
I understand that predictions are tough (especially about the future!), but I am wondering to what extent you think it will be possible for him to bypass this “shadow banning” and get his message out and/or to what extent it might be possible that he somehow gets a fair hearing for/chance to debate his policies.
Thanks,
Pierre
JMG,
At this stage of your career which events, i.e., conferences, festivals, or any others of that ilk do you deem worth attending? Are events of that nature seemingly getting less attractive for any reasons? Are there any that you deem too important to miss?
If so, why?
Thanks,
The CodeSmith
@Chuaquin #35,
India is the Saudi Arabia of thorium deposits and have been trying to get thorium reactors to work practically for the past 70 years. If there’s any country that should be able to get it to work – they have the technology and the resources to do it – it should have been them. But at present, the only thing they still have is a handful of test reactors.
Jeff, JMG already said most of what I was going to say: by the American Civil War cavalry was already mostly a reconnaissance force. Repeating rifles and some small field artillery are more than enough to tear horses apart. You very occassionally got succesful infantry charges (with massive casualties) but infantry tends to have much greater numbers so the math is a little better. And everyone’s got bayonets, so even if your cavalry meets the enemy it’s like charging into a forest of spears with a saber and a pistol.
The other key issue is industry is industry and logistics. The ACW is in many ways more like a proto-WW1 than an advanced Napoleonic war- the South had great generals, but without an industrial base it was a lost cause. The railroads became a key focus – the North was sending huge supply trains everyday and the South was marching around barefoot stealing pigs from farms. There was one battle in Maryland where the Confederates were barely supplied with moldy bread while the North was supplying fresh-brewed coffee to all the troops every morning. The difference in whether a low-tech future war is more like 1865 or more like 1812 is going to be as much about what kind of logistics are available as anything else.
Jeff, JMG and Epileptic Doomer re machine guns and warfare–
I was also thinking that bullets, rounds, and shells would be the limiting factor. You don’t get much more out of machine-gunning than from single-shot-at-a-time riflery, so I think rifles will be the order of the day.
Current ammunition uses smokeless powder, which some of my friends have stated is actually lower-powered than black powder. The crucial ingredient of black powder is still the potassium nitrate, both the potassium and the nitrogen in same. If these become scarce enough, might bows and arrows retake center stage as the ranged weapons of choice, at least for the infantry and cavalry? Black powder might be reserved for the aforementioned artillery.
Ultralight aircraft– instead, maybe hot-air dirigibles, pushed about by alcohol engines. With these you remove the need to use the alcohol energy for lift, you are only using it for propulsion. Simple firewood could be used for the lift, as in hot air balloons. People in hang gliders are also a possibility as scouts; you can actually soar and travel for fair distances in the long-winged ones, if the terrain and weather are right. Horse-towed hang gliders could also be used.
Steel, aluminum and copper should still be available, at least for some centuries. We’ve refined out a whole bunch of these materials and they can be recycled and made into things for awhile yet. The fabric of the hang gliders and dirigibles could be silk. (Wikipedia once said that nylon could be synthesized from biological materials, but I can’t find that statement now.)
I heartily agree with the idea of war-gaming all these ideas out. Each player (or team of players) gets their own copy of the same game board, on which they can see only their pieces and whatever enemy pieces they are able to observe. The Game Master (you would need one) would have a copy of the board on which everyone’s pieces are visible. Terrain, wind, and weather must factor into the game as well.
I just posted a side comment about the Civil War but here’s the question I was waiting for an Open Post day to ask: does anybody else feel that the chorus of “overpopulation is not the problem – underpopulation is!” is reaching a fever pitch in the media and online lately? You expect it in the conservative press – here’s the latest in a long series of natalist screeds that seem to come weekly in The American Conservative (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-arent-americans-having-children/), but as a more liberal example here’s a Scott Alexander post comparing Ehlrich’s The Population Bomb” to eugenics on the list of “terrible ideas” and presupposing that Ehrlich’s ideas have been so thoroughly discredited as to be embarrassing (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck). I feel like I see this sort of thing all over the place lately – the idea that the threat of overpopulation was a ridiculous, obvious failed prediction, like a global ice age or a thriving moon metropolis by 2000 or whatever, and I don’t really understand it. The basic math – infinite growth on a limited planet – just doesn’t add up, even if you get the forecast wrong by fifty years. Saying the bomb was a bust because we’re still feeding the world in 2023 is like saying “It’s no problem my car has no brakes, I haven’t hit anything yet, just keep driving.” All it takes is one time that technology doesn’t keep up with population and the crash hits. You can’t roll natural 20s forever. And I understand that there are serious economic issues that are going to pop up by a shrinking population, but if the only way you can keep the economy going is by living unsustainably, then sooner or later it’s not going to be sustained.
It feels like we’ve reached the point where the propagandists have decided we can’t brook any dissent on this one. Admitting that the Earth has a population problem means admitting that progress can’t solve everything, that stuff is getting crappier all the time, that we don’t have enough resources to give everyone free everything all the time equally – all the stuff that’s anathema to the modernist mindset. It’s just weird that it was acceptable to have all this out in the public discourse up until the 90s, but I guess we’ve reached the point where the cracks are showing through so strongly that the consensus needs some more official endorsement. Or am I just turning into a grumpy middle-aged environmentalist?
I have a movie recommendation for any Ecosophian who likes to watch screens. I was lucky enough to watch “My Neighbor Totoro,” Tonari no Totoro in Japanese, for the first time last week with my daughters. I say lucky because I never would’ve understood the movie had I not first read JMG’s series of posts on enchantment.
Despite taking place in what seems to be postwar Japan in the countryside, Totoro takes place in a completely enchanted world, where both the children and the adults treat spirits as something that exist and don’t question it. I realized something was different when the little girl first meets a spirit she calls Totoro (a mispronunciation of Troll), and instead of denying its existence, her father tells her that she’s lucky because he doesn’t show himself often and that they should go to the shrine and pay their respects. And they go to a shrine at the base of a giant Camphor tree and pay their respects.
The spirits themselves are weird, mostly uninterested in humans, don’t talk, can be scary at times, and seem oblivious to the human concerns. The two sisters form a relationship with Totoro, and he only helps in the climax of the movie because he gets asked and he seems happy to help (hard to tell because he doesn’t talk at all). I’ve never seen anything like it, and watching it made me better understand what JMG means by enchanted world, and I think it’s good to show children because it shows them a way of experiencing the world differently from our modern one where so much of that gets actively suppressed.
Michaelz, fair enough. For what it’s worth, I hope psychoanalysis can evolve that way — but we’ll see.
Doomer, (1) no, just don’t try to interpret the planetary influences too far out. (2) When the Moon enters each sign and when it goes void of course.
Patricia M, Modi does that a lot — the sign of a resurgent great culture.
Stephen, that’s why field artillery is likely to be more significant. You don’t need fine tolerances to fire grapeshot.
Yiğit, it all depends on what the economic situation is like where you are. Here in the US, a literature degree is a guarantee of poverty — our university system is on the brink of collapse — but for all I know things may be different in Turkiye.
Slink, Desmet’s book is worth reading. You might also like to read a classic text, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, which makes some related points.
Disc_writes, delighted to hear it!
Jonathan, fun! I didn’t know the War Nerd had discussed Grierson.
Quin, as always, thanks for this.
The-eu-OT, I have no idea. One of the lessons you learn if you have Aspergers syndrome is that You. Do. Not. Know. What. Other. People. Think. — even if they’re also on the spectrum.
Bofur, my question is how much of that money will actually turn into internet access, and how much of it is going to slip away in various sticky palms — subject, of course, to 10% for the Big Guy…
Anonymous, there’s very little material on the subject. What I know I’ve picked up in scraps and brief passages in old books.
Enjoyer, if Grusch was an actual whistleblower, he’d be whisked away instantly to jail and would be facing 10 to 20 plus for violating the various US official secrets laws, if he didn’t get Epsteined first. Ergo, he’s one more government plant shoveling one more round of bullfeathers. My guess? The current administration is up to its eyeballs in scandals and crises, and is probably hoping to generate a really loud distraction.
Ray, that’s going on in a lot of places. Across the river in Providence, a lot of rundown areas toward the harbor are getting built up in a hurry. The age of the suburbs is over; the reign of the cities is returning, as the energy expenditure needed to maintain suburban lifestyles becomes unaffordable.
Chris, not weird at all. If anybody seriously paid attention to that they’d know that we’re heading face first for a world-class mess. That’s not something most people want to think about!
Anonymous, bingo. It’s starting to sink in that a very large share of the internet will never pay for itself; that being the case, yeah, a lot of online amenities are headed the way of Pets.com.
Smith, it’s always a struggle. The most important part of that struggle is letting yourself realize that it makes no sense — and you’re already there.
Pierre, RFK Jr. is doing to the Democrats what Trump did to the GOP. Of course the media is trying to stomp him. The fact that they’re talking about him at all shows that they’ve failed to erase him; now watch him ride the Streisand Effect. I think he’s got a significant shot at the nomination.
CodeSmith, I’ve stopped going to all such events. On the one hand, most of them have gotten highly political and shrill of late; on the other, they simply don’t do that much for my career — and I don’t enjoy such things. Crowds are never something I like.
Cicada, saltpeter is a renewable resource, so gunpowder is likely to be here to stay. One of the things that makes guns so valuable in war is that they’re much easier to use; it takes years of practice to be as good with a longbow as you get with a few weeks of drill with a musket. As for dirigibles, there’s good reason why those dropped out of use; fixed-wing aircraft are more stable in the air and require much less in the way of resources. Three or four items along these lines —
— would provide aerial reconnaissance for an army; they’re cheap, they’re portable, they don’t need airfields, and you can survey a lot of territory from them very fast.
DaveOTN, there’s another factor — population growth is slowing very rapidly now. We’re probably going to be at peak global population by 2030, and after that decline sets in. That’s far more challenging than anybody’s prepared to face. Can you imagine what will happen when your house loses money every year? It will, once the supply of homes exceeds the demand…
Hello JMG,
I remember Charles Eisenstein writing something about organized religions usually ending up enacting the exact opposites of their founding principles. The obvious examples are Christianity and violence, and Science and dogmatism. First I’d like to ask if you agree with this observation; and second – since we live in an age with great potential for future religions to be born (we are, right?) – if one were trying to start a new religion, what can he or she do to counter this tendency, or (better yet) utilize it?
A comment on psychoanalysis: The anthropologist Tanya Luhrman, known to many pagans for her study _Persuasions of the Witches Craft_, wrote a book on the training of psychiatrists called _Of Two Minds_. Her focus in both of these books (and other later works) is on the process by which people come to adopt a world view which is different from and sometimes at odds with the world view of the surrounding society. This is obviously the case with witches and magicians. However it is also the case with psychiatrists. They have to be trained out of the “common sense” view of human actions and motivations and learn to accept and use the theories and methods of their discipline. Her fourth book was _When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God_. It continues the theme of “how do they learn to think and experience differently than the mainstream. She currently teaches at Stanford University.
For cicada grove, I remembered that nylon could be made from natural sources too. Nylon 66 is made from adipic acid. That can be made from corn stalks and cobs.
I found an abstract about that.
Co-production of 1,4-pentanediol and adipic acid from corn stover with biomass-derived co-solvent: Process synthesis and analysis
As environmental issues caused by the use of fossil-derived chemicals arise, efforts to replace fossil-based feedstocks with renewable and environment-friendly resources to mitigate the environmental impact of chemical production have been continuously made. In this study, an integrated process utilizing separation and catalytic conversion was designed to co-produce adipic acid (ADA), a precursor used to produce nylon 6.6, and 1,4-pentanediol (1,4-PDO), a monomer for biodegradable polymer, from corn stover as a renewable resource. Cellulose and hemicellulose are simultaneously converted into gamma-valerolactone (GVL), and the GVL is further split and converted into ADA and 1,4-PDO. The energy consumption for the process is significantly reduced by designing and incorporating a heat exchanger network. Techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment were performed to evaluate the economic and environmental impacts of the three representative cases having different GVL split ratios for ADA and 1,4-PDO production. The results indicate that the case producing the most ADA leads to an optimal minimum selling price of $1382/ton ADA under the proposed assumptions and has a marginal impact on the environment compared to the fossil-based ADA production. Uncertainty analysis showed that this co-production process has economic stability against variable market conditions. These results suggest directions to improve the economic and environmental feasibility of the proposed process.
For smith, #74, it was never a line, but a grid, 2 dimensional.
Left/ right still exists, it’s the x axis. The y axis runs from anarchy at the bottom up to totalitarianism at the top.
You can make an argument it’s sort of diamond shaped, left-right doesn’t matter in anarchy. At the top whether it’s the left wing or the right wing that is shooting you in the head and kicking your body into a trench is sort of irrelevant.
The difference between fascism and socialism is less than you think too. Both are the merger of corporations and the State. Whether the State nationalizes the corporations or the corporations assimilate the State via regulatory capture the result is the same. The stated goals are different, income equality vs a national culture, but neither has any tolerance for dissent.
“That’s far more challenging than anybody’s prepared to face. Can you imagine what will happen when your house loses money every year?”
It seems to me that a massive drop in housing prices will be a big net positive for human well-being – with the obvious exception of the investment class. I expect a lot of other things to be challenging – like, oh, how to care for an immense aging population and how to adapt food production to lower energy inputs – but I’m looking forward to the end of the housing crunch.
John:
I use to dip into, read here and there in the Will Durant set of books on Western civilization. I was curious if you had read any of those volumes and how the Durant work compares to Spengler or Toynbee.
@Alan
I would also like to see this discussion.
When it comes to the origins of nonconformity i cannot comment, but i think I have an explanation why those seen as “intelligent” are more conformist.
This happens in part by definition.
A main criteria for attributing intelligence to a person is their success in the educational system.
This system in turn sorts by the ability to conform more than anything else.
Not the only cause of course, but significant.
@JMG can we vote for a post on this issue? maybe on a future 5th wednesday?
Another WoH theory: Aseneth becomes a time-travelling drug dealer, selling milk to the cat future.
Pat #69, another advntage of Gatling guns is they’re more tolerant of faulty ammunition. A regular machine gun uses energy from the previous bullet to load the next one. So if there’s a dud the gun needs to be manually re-cocked. But Gatling guns are driven by an outside force – either a hand crank, or an electric motor on modern miniguns. They keep it going and duds are spat out just the same as expended shells. The rate of fire is so fast the operator doesn’t even notice the failures.
thank you for your answer on thorium reactors. I think China program is strongly baased in public money, by the way…
——————————————————-
I have another doubt about another topic.
JMG; you said (#34):
“there’s potentially a very promising future for psychoanalysis, once it stops being the preserve of a self-perpetuating expert class focused on making a living from the work.”
Do you think the same promising future is available for Gestalt Therapy? (Its origins are psychoanalytical, indeed).
A friend daughter stayed in Gestalt therapy for 3 years (attending weekly sesions) but she was healed of her agoraphobia. It wasn’t cheap, but therapy worked with her. So i’m very interested in that psychoterapy school now.
Carlos M. #77: Thank you for the info. I had no idea about the Indian thorium reserves…
JMG- any thoughts on the recent passing of Ted Kaczynski and on the contents of his manifesto?
@The Other Owen, about the beer labels…
I conducted a spontaneous field study in our fridge – alas, only one brand of beer available last night. There was no serving temperature prescribed at all, neither on the front nor on the back.
The „fresh“ (but bottled) beer we oftentimes buy has a general refrigeration notice, otherwise the beer would spoil – but, lo and behold, that isn‘t printed on the back, but on the front label and in rather large letters. Seems that people simply don‘t read the fineprint on the back… 😉
These are both beers from the German South-West, btw. So either this region of Germany is a bit more relaxed than others, as far as serving temperatures are concerned. Or you might wanna consider switching brands to something less temperature-delicate… 😉
Btw, I refuse the conclusion that at least some Germans must care enough about beer serving temperatures! It‘s just as likely that this was introduced by a foreigner who was acting on the cliché that all Germans are pedants, and so this had to be stated to please the national soul… 😀
Milkyway
PS: This discussion about beer contains meditation fodder for at least a week… 😉
Hey JMG
I was meant to have written this book recommendation earlier but didn’t get the chance last open post.
Whilst in Brisbane’s famous secondhand bookshop “Bent books” I came across a rather amazing book that seems extremely relevant to your theory that one of the best ways to preserve the scientific method would be by teaching how to apply it in biology.
The book is called “Darwin’s backyard” by James T Costa, and it essentially is another book on how Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution, but with a focus on his experiments, along with some DIY instructions for recreating some of them.
I have not read this book yet, so I can’t say how good it is, nonetheless I think it would be worth a lot of people’s time to check it out.
Chuaquin asks about thorium reactors. As JMG comments, these come up from time to time – and are forgotten soon after. If something presented a The One True Solution keeps appearing every few years and then disappearing, there’s a good reason for both. The reason for the appearance is obvious enough – it’s The One True Solution! We won’t have to change a thing in our daily lives! – and the reason for the disappearance is, well, it either doesn’t work, or doesn’t scale.
Thorium occurs naturally as almost only one isotope, Th-232. Itself it’s not radioactive, so it won’t produce harmful radiation – nor will it do anything in a nuclear reactor or bomb.
However, if you put something which is radioactive with it, something emitting neutrons – a “seed” – then the Th-232 becomes U-233. U-233 is actually fissile, in other words it breaks up and releases energy – and more neutrons. The problem is that U-233 burns very hot, and is very, very difficult to handle safely.
The real issue, however, is the seed. Without the seed, the Th-232 won’t turn into U-233 and fission and produce energy. What’s the seed made out of? U-235 – which is 0.7% of normal uranium – or Pu-239 – plutonium, which is made from U-235 in uranium nuclear reactors.
In other words, each thorium reactor needs a uranium reactor to keep it going. So at best thorium reactors would effectively double the amount of uranium we could make use of. Of course, worldwide electricity use is now in 2023 twice what it was in 2000. If this continues, then it’ll be twice again in 2046. But then, we have an awful lot of developing countries who want to use more energy (USA uses 12,500kWh per person annually, India uses 1,000), and a lot of renewables advocates who want more of our energy to be in electrical form. So the doubling might come a lot more quickly than we expect – if it’s based just on demand.
Of course, while demand is not subject to physical reality, supply is. So I don’t think thorium reactors are going to save us all. In fact, I don’t think they’ll even be a rounding error in world energy production.
Epileptic Doomer says:
#50 June 28, 2023 at 4:26 pm
Some people find “fingering the beads” of astrological information every day especially for themselves is useful. Good luck to you if you do. Others, such as myself, have not found very much use in it. I guess I’m too deeply into my circumstances to gain much insight through astrology, and at need I find Tarot or other forms of divination more meaningful and helpful.
If you simply want to understand the weather, astrologically, as it pertains to your region, why your pocket calendar is a fine thing to do. As for larger events, it takes a certain cast of mind to interpret things that way. Talent plus effort. Who knows, you may be one such person.
From time immemorial, people (farmers, Paracelsus-type doctors and the like) have followed the moon’s signs and phases and the planetary hours. I would suggest giving those a try in your calendar. YMMV with all this, however.
Just as a side-note, while I’ve found relationship astrology consistently revealing, individual natal astrology often doesn’t come up with the kinds of answers to life situations one would hope it did…unless you are a celebrity, important figure or organization of some sort. There, it can be amazing. It’s not without value at a personal level, just that “fingering the beads” whether with progressions or transits or much of anything else can be quite frustrating. At least for me. Better to have a talk with the divinities ruling the planets on a regular basis, would be my guess, than simply going full astrological.
Interpreting one’s own chart factors by oneself can also be fraught. Too much hope and fear that interferes in getting an accurate read. Again, you may have a gift for it. So whether the day-calendar will be useful to you is not something that I believe can be answered in a general way.
@stephen h. pearson (#52):
Until the late 1700s, the Crimea wasn’t populated by Slavs at all, but by Turkic-Tatar peoples. Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796, seized it from the Ottoman Empire in the 1700s. Khrushchev handed it over to Ukraine for political convenience in (IIRC) the 1950s, that is, within the lifetime of its oldest inhabitants, who were thoroughly Russian.
Odessa and its surrounds was another one of Catherine the Great’s Russification projects as she expanded her Empire’s borders southward to the north coasts of the Black and Azov seas. She encouraged massive Russian settlements in all her conquered lands.
What is now Ukraine formed its current egregore much later than what is now Russia, and formed it on the earlier Russian pattern: each positioned itself as the one and only legitimate heir of Kievan Rus’. And, for my money’s worth, each claim is equally legitimate in historical terms, though neither is more legitimate than the other. Since the two claims cannot be reconciled, endless political conflict is is inevitable, punctuated by occasional military activity.
[My principal advisor during my graduate work on Slavic historical linguistics at Columbia University in 1964/5–1971/2 was George Y. Shevelov (1906-2002), a Ukrainian academic whose parents identified as Russians (his father was a Russian military officer), whose earlier ancestors were German (Schneider/Šnaĭder was his surname at birth), and whose own academic career began at the University of Kharkiv/Khar’kov. His own family history may serve as a useful gauge for the complexity of the current Ukrainian question.]
As for the current war, nominally between Ukraine and Russia, it looks to me as though it is actually a surrogate war between the USA/NATO and Russia carried out amidst the still flammable detritus of World War 2 on Ukraine’s territory.
The younger generation seems to be catching some of your ideas.
https://youtu.be/pD53ttMUgxk
This youtuber has created many videos looking at history through different lenses and he just put out a video today talking about how all the ideologies had failed.
This is a quote from the end of the video where he describes the 20th century as the century of pseudo science… “In this world (the world of his generation’s future) the technological scheme will seem like a bitter joke from a lost time in an age of decline.”
There really isn’t any video it’s just him talking. There are some text blocks on screen from time to time but they aren’t necessary to understanding the point.
Thought folks might find this interesting.
-Daniel
Dennis Michael Sawyers #81, you got the better one with the Japanese version. I prefer English for all other Miyazaki films, but because Japanese is such a fast-spoken language it really exaggerates the hyperactivity of the two girls. The other films you’ll want to watch are Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. They’re about spirits on Earth, spirits in the spirit world, and mages respectively.
My favourite is Castle in the Sky since I first saw it in 1988 – that’s more steampunk, magic stones and robots caring for nature. That film shapes my aesthetic and sense of beauty to this day. It also has an interesting history of dubs and different music, and I think the most recent DVD is suposed to have them all. One version is the definition of ‘achingly beautiful’.
I can’t help but think the Russo-Ukraine war is a harbinger of how wars will be fought going forward. Sort of like how the Civil War turned into WW1 in terms of tactics.
@Hosea Tanatu #58 re: “When I said that some people just don’t detect social signals very well, I had in mind something analogous to a sensory condition like color-blindness or tone-deafness, where the individual literally doesn’t perceive social signals in the same way that others do. Or perhaps they perceive the signals but just don’t care, which has the same long-term result. Why shouldn’t that tendency have a genetic component? Color-blindness does.”
The inability to perceive social signals is very well understood these days, and in some cases, yes, there is a genetic component. I know there is in my case.
Somewhat OT: but I’ll be out of town for Magic Monday. At the altar today, I was about to do the meditation assigned, but instead ended up talking to Jupiter about how I was going to ride out the current bump in the road, being in no position to do 90% of what most people will do.
He Told me “Simplicity of life and the old republican virtues,” referencing as if in an overlay, the ideal Roman matron/grandmother (Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi) and Louisa May Alcott’s stalwart grandmothers full of the (for her times) old-fashioned virtues of those who remembered Concord and Bunker Hill. And then specified “American republican virtues.” Leaving open the question of which America? My mother’s Connecticut Yankee? My father’s Scots-Irish-German Appalachian? And then there’s the overlay of “50 years in an alien culture,” where Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe reigned.”
“Remember. Or failing that, invent.”
JMG, yeah, the only losses in such a system are friction where the heat isn’t useful, such as the bearings of the rotor. Of course you’re going from a zero entropy energy source (shaft power) to a high entropy one (hot water). When the Danes experimented with these in the last oil crisis, it was common to have between 1 and 25 tons of water to store energy with.
Of course, this is a technology for someone who has land in a suitably windy place to experiment with, not me.
@Jeff and Robert: Thank you! The only one on either of those lists that I’ve read is Pollan’s *How to Change Your Mind*– because of course it’s easier to find the ones about psychedelics. He does approach it from a pretty straight materialist view, and as a result I think he’s quite naive about it, but I did learn a lot about the current state of the research from that book. And now I have a bunch of interesting looking stuff to add to my reading list!
I was just looking a package of loose rolling tobacco next to where my husband commonly sits – he has been a smoker all of his adult life, and has never considered stopping – and it suddenly hit me that its packaging has been turned into a powerful nocebo curse.
For anyone unfamiliar with EU tobacco packaging law, it has led to cigarette and loose tobacco packs that are all of the same drab green colour, which feature large and garish colour photos of sick people’s injured body parts, along with written warnings that are not phrased in “risk” language (Tobacco consumption *may* increase your risk of X) but in prediction language (Tobacco consumption causes X). If you want to know the brand of the cigarette or tobacco product you are looking at, you have to squint. (There are some packaging photos here https://tobaccotactics.org/article/tobacco-packaging-tobacco-industry-marketing/ )
I realise that I am disturbed at what this packaging may be accomplishing as it assures every smoker’s subconscious, every single day, that
[[[they are going to sicken and die in some ugly and painful way]]]*.
It looks to me like a very effective curse, designed to activate the “nocebo” response (opposite of “placebo”) and make people sick, regardless of how they might otherwise have fared.
So, I’m wondering if anyone has given any thought to how one turns aside such environmentally prevalent, and non-directional, yet still effectively targeted, curses?
* Sorry, I felt a very strong urge to put bracketing walls around such a stark phrase!
Hi John Michael,
Alas, I wish it were not so.
Hey, as to “needs to inspire rather than to be inspired” that’s how I roll. I must say, I don’t feel any great discomfiture with my wiring. Hmm. And certainly there was a distinct possibility that this was the case given I reckon my mother had undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Her mother was actually institutionalised. Not good. Dunno man, but I did keep a respectful distance from them all, from a very young age. Let’s just say that they taught me how to be a decent person from watching how things rolled in their lives. It was a bit messy really. Anyway, I’ve noted the male-female concept and have wondered about it. A mystery perhaps?
Cheers
Chris
John, what exactly do you mean by “Can you imagine what will happen when your house loses money every year? It will, once the supply of homes exceeds the demand…” in your reply to DaveOTN?
Do you just mean the values of homes are going to be going down and down as population declines? That I can and will try to imagine.
The book Dhalgren has been on my mind lately, perhaps in part because of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires causing massive haze in my city, and on the other hand, my step-daughter moving back out into a way-expensive apartment in an old mansion just outside the university district. I kept thinking of these old homes being less and less inhabited, and in time, probably squatted in by people. In Delany’s city of Bellona, housing wasn’t the problem -the city was mostly empty and people could live where they want.
So one of the problems the zoomers are having now -ultra high rent- might not be a problem in about another decade or so (though there will be other problems).
The punk house / hippie house / shared house is a “down home punk” living arrangement that could see some traction again, as could the extended family.
Yet, another problem the zoomers have (sorry y’all, I know it is not all of you) is the lack of willingness to chip in with basic chores that makes the extended family tenable. (My step-daughter could have stayed longer, but I think living with her roommate instead of her mom and step-dad will be more instructive to her than it was staying with us for a year after the end of her last relationship.
I do feel for Gen Z and others starting out -but it does seem like the housing situation will have to change at some point -esp. when the current bubble bursts.
Which leads me to price gouging…
It cost me forty bucks to see Skinny Puppy. I was willing to part with that to see a favorite band on their final tour. Taylor Swift is in Cincinnati this weekend and some hams I know were working on the coms for the show (in the communication biz). On last nights net one of them mentioned cheapest tickets 3000 dollars. To me that just screams that you hate your fans, if it costs that much to see you play.
I did respect Swift for her re-recording all her albums to get out of a contract with the record companies, but these kind of prices are for elites. What of the common people who want to take their daughter to see her favorite pop star? Well, I guess they can go in debt even further if that is their choice. It just seems so unnecessary to charge that much.
There’s a person who has been blogging about America’s genesis myths, and how they differ from the Old World’s genesis myths – especially Christianity:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/06/dinosaurs-cavemen-and-volcanic-disaster.html
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/06/ancient-aliens-americas-divine.html
This ties neatly with JMG’s assertion that Christianity is only a pseudomorph in America and America will sooner or later shed its Christian trappings and become its own thing.
On post industrial warfare, if you can maintain the ability to make and use pneumatic tools then pneumatic guns may be a very good choice. Compressed Air powered tools are relatively simple and add a lot of capability. It is the kind of intermediate technology that we should be giving a lot more thought to as we undergo the long decent.
JMG, there has been recent developments in bow and arrow technology that looks like it greatly reduces the training requirements for effective bowmen. It from this crazy German dude who runs the Slingshot Channel on youtube. He came up with a magazine to hold multiple arrows on bow. It turns out when you do that it makes it a lot easier to learn how to shoot a bow. It is now a lot more like rifle training. He initially called his little invention “The Instant Legolas”, you can take a guy off the street and with very little training he can aim and fire 6 arrows in ~30 seconds.
As a follow up to my housing comment, here is an article I wrote on sci-fi geek Slan Shacks and one of the original punk houses, Dial House of Crass:
http://www.sothismedias.com/home/slan-shacks-dial-house
This is a follow up to my older article Squatters Rites:
http://www.sothismedias.com/home/squatters-rites
been away for brain injury reasons.
Anyway, why does every time someone discusses weather in the News, they burble on about Global Warming? What are we supposed to do with that piece of information or is it a boilerplate for weather reporting?
What did people say before about heat waves of the past? Just that it was awful?
So with the information that x weather even is caused by Global Warning (although it was proven that the one recently in Italy was not), are we to pound on Exxon-Mobil’s doors screaming that they stop drilling? Are we to go whole hog on batteries no matter how polluting they actually are? What is the mantra trying to tell people?
As for me, I think it is hubris to think that somehow humans can stop Global Warming or what ever.
about last week’s post.
I did not grow up in suburbia, instead in a very rural area of northern Maine, in a tiny town of 60 people. I do not understand Wolf’s ideas of the safe mundane world of the past. Where I lived, you had to watch out for wild animals such as a black bear coming into your year or a group of them at the town dump. (For entertainment, one year, everyone watched the town dump burn.) Or drinking water that wasn’t from a spring could make you sick. So for me the world was never mundane or safe or predictable.
Wolf’s idea of that non-Jewish Gods are evil is interesting to me. I do not understand that other than deep Monotheistic cultural training that all Gods are just stories except when They are actively thwarting God’s will.
Mr. Greer – your book – “A World Full of Gods” is it revised or simply republished. You did say something about the idea of other Gods being evil is an automatic response for people like Naomi Wolf.
Hackenschmidt#83: OK, thank you for your comment about “Thorium illusion”.
JMG,
Which sorts of daily protection rituals would you recommend for someone looking to insulate themselves from ideological possession and online marketing. Part of the day job exposes me to fringe online extremism and conspiracy content, unplugging/avoiding would necessitate a career change. But I’ve noticed the unhelpful unproductive energies creeping in to my forest walks and meditations. Going into election season I would like to build out my toolbox to combat astral vampirism.
I’m familiar with the LBRP but the symbolism of neopagen earth magic tends to resonate with me a bit more, but I do need to connect with something deeper than lucky charms to carry around.
In the last week, someone asked about “The Return of the Gods” by Jonathan Cahn. I actually wrote a blog about it.
Just excerpts:
In a series of books, Jonathan Cahn decries how the United States has turned from God. Claiming to be a prophet, he receives special insight from the mysteries unveiled in the Old Testament. Cahn says that the future is dire unless the U.S. repents its ways.
(Cahn had said that the Clintons were the modern Ahab and Jezebel, while Trump was Jehu, sent by God to “drain the swamp.”)
In his latest book, “The Return of the Gods,” Cahn details the plot of the Gods of Mesopotamia to take back control from God (Yahweh). He writes “could these gods, or beings, actually be the unseen movers and catalysts of modern culture?” In the introduction, Cahn continues “And so the gods returned. And having returned they began working their dark magic…And as the seeds of their planting come to fruition and their spirits infused more and more of the modern world, they grew still more powerful.”
The thesis, which Cahn has presented in his earlier books is that the “Word of God, the Spirit of God, the Gospel” came to the Roman Empire. This Spirit of God cast out the “Pagan” Gods and cleansed the West of their evil. According to Cahn, blessed by God, Western Civilization became hegemonic in the world. However, beginning in the 1960s with the ending of prayers in public schools, the United States cast out God. Because nothing has replaced God, the “old” Gods came back in force to dominate.
Cahn focuses on what he calls the “Dark Trinity.” He accuses Ba’al, Molech, and Ishtar with destroying society. Ba’al, a rival of Yahweh in the Old Testament, is the Possessor, who has taken possession of the children in the modern age. Ishtar, who is a stand-in for Astarte, is the Enchantress and the Transformer. The Destroyer, Molech is the God that Christians often use to defame Polytheists by accusing them of child sacrifice. (Three Gods are mentioned more often in the Old Testament by the various Prophets – Ba’al, Asherah, and Moloch. Cahn equates Ishtar with Asherah.)
—
You can read the rest at : https://neptunesdolphins.wordpress.com/2023/04/12/the-return-of-the-gods-a-polytheistic-perspective/
Please note that Cahn is a part of the New Apostolic Reformation (who have renamed themselves). Many mainline Christian groups have denounced him and the NAR for theological reasons.
On future wars:
The American civil war was between two roughly evenly-matched sides. Where one side is much stronger you might consider the Anglo-Boer war. The Boers had a commando system with elected leaders. They were mounted and very mobile, able to live off the land, and crack shots with Mauser rifles. They were able to hold off a far stronger British army for some years. Eventually the British corralled them with lines of blockhouses and barbed wire, and starved them into submission by putting their families in concentration camps, burning their farms, and stealing their cattle. These actions devastated the Afrikaners and left a legacy of bitterness that lingered for many, many years.
On machine guns:
During my national service I was made a machine gunner. Not that I had any aptitude for it; I was the smallest so I got the biggest gun. Typical army humor. It was the FN light machine gun, belt fed, 7.62 mm, similar to the American M240. A lovely gun, very accurate at long range, good rate of fire. Great for trench warfare. Mount it on a tripod and aim it just above the enemy’s trench parapet and you merely have to traverse it to blow their heads off. But probably too complex to manufacture in a deindustrial age. Maybe Uzi-type weapons will survive. Cheap and nasty and spraying bullets in all directions, but easy to make.
For a fairly erudite discussion on which is the best machine gun you might try https://www.forgottenweapons.com/hitlers-zipper-the-mg-42-universal-machine-gun/
@Neptune’s Dolphin #113 – not only do they have screaming fits over climate change/global warming, but all the science magazines I read also have ads or articles touting tours to places all over the globe. “Right hand, meet left hand.”
“Howdy, stranger.”
The summer solstice was last week, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop being a hippie druid punk. After all, the Fourth of July is just around the corner.
Let your flags of freedom & freakdom fly.
For those of you who couldn’t make it to Stonehenge, or go to the White Mountains of NH for the annual Rainbow Gathering of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, here is a piece I wrote on the late great Wally Hope, instigator of the Stonehenge Free Festival.
http://www.sothismedias.com/home/hippie-druid-punks
It is a side tale to the story of Dial House, but Wally’s life is certainly connected to a greater Universalist Bohemianism.
Still reading Dark Age America. Got to the part with an exaggerated scenario where some day people will have been manipulated to prefer artificial limbs to real ones. Here we are seven years after that book was published and we have a massive sex change industry which is a $2 billion business. Fiction has become reality. Why are schools, cities, counties, states, and the federal government pushing this industry?
JMG,
In some of his writings and speeches RFK Jr identifies himself as a Stoic. From what you have seen of him, does this seem accurate ( to the extent that a mans inner philosophy is apparent to an observer). And if so what kind of a president do you think a true stoic would make?
If he were to win and we had a stoic as president it draws some interesting parallels to the Roman Empire during its decline. But it seems as though we are well past the time of Marcus Aurelius. In fact I would say it is 400 AD in the American Empire and the Visigoths are banging on the gates.
Dear JMG,
nonetheless: thank you very much!
@neptunesdolphins: …reagrding talking about heatwaves – before climate-weirding in Germany they wondered if the heatwave did fit with the 100years calendar.
Hi JMG,
Just finished reading the Witch of Criswell (spoilers ahead if you have not read it). I’ve never took magic seriously but have learned to respect your opinions even though I’m for the most part a rational scientific person. I do believe that the universe is beyond human comprehension and we can never understand or explain it all.
I thought reading the Witch would be an enjoyable way to be exposed to real magic. I enjoyed it but am also puzzled that the magic seemed more Harry Potter than I thought it would be. As I understand it the evil witch was stealing the life force from the tenants of the rental house to live longer. This seems well beyond a change in consciousness, more like something Lord Voldemort did to Ginny Weasley. What am I missing?
Thanks,
Bob
@DaveOTN re: overpopulation –
1. The economy depends in part on continued population growth. If the population stops growing, the economy starts breaking down. How quickly is an issue, of course; financial gimmickry can keep it going for a while and immigration can hold up or even increase the population for a time – but immigrants don’t have to come here (barring something like – gulp – a slave trade) and gimmickry has diminishing returns. Add onto this the fact that the cultural shifts over the past fifty years have in many respects favored smaller families and fewer children. I wouldn’t be surprised, if “underpopulation” becomes a serious-enough issue, to see a sudden hard rightward push of the cultural pendulum.
2. The Baby Boomers still dominate the public discourse. They’re not getting any younger and the great longevity-extending technologies they had been expecting have hitherto failed to materialize.
3. If overpopulation is a problem, the obvious follow-up question is “okay, what do you intend to do about it?”, because most people don’t understand the difference between a problem and a predicament and assume, therefore, that it must have a solution. World population growth is simply births minus deaths, so if you want to “solve” it you have to either decrease the minuend (i.e. fewer babies need to be born) and/or increase the subtrahend (i.e. people have to die). That latter, especially, is unconscionable, and pointing out that it will happen anyway doesn’t earn you many friends because many people also equate prediction with desire. The statement “overpopulation is a problem” is easily reinterpreted as “I want people to die”; from that, in turn, stems the thorny question of which people it is presumed that you want to die, which touches on the absolute taboo on eugenics.
JMG, A while ago you proposed a possible scenario where climate bands shift and the area, roughly where The Great Lakes are in Eastern North America becomes more desert like. In such a scenario would you envision The St. Lawrence River becoming something akin to The Nile? Thank you
I’ve had a somewhat troubling thought of late: I’ve watched all the effort to force people to use the internet, all the resources being thrown at it, all the systematic efforts to obliterate the alternatives, and have wondered exactly what’s happening. I think I finally have an answer, and it’s related to ideology. I think the internet has become the Last Stand of Progress. Whenever confronted with the realities of decline, people wave out their cellphones, or laptops, or some other internet connected device; it has become a talisman to say Progress is still happening. This is why so much is being used to keep it running, why it’s never allowed to shrink, and why the idea someone somewhere might choose not to use it, or to control their use of it, is so terrifying to so many people. If this is the case, then as it sinks in that it can’t pay for itself and investors start to bail, I wonder what will happen next. When the internet starts to break down, then, I wonder if that will be the end of Prgoress as a dominant ideology, and if this is the case, I wonder what kind of effects this will have, and what will replace it.
goedeck @ 88 I have read most of the Durant books. They are, as I recall, mostly expository, a grand survey of world history as it was understood in the English speaking world at the time of publication. The Durants did not appear to me to have stinted on research about Asian civilizations, but of course someone more knowledgeable might take a different view on that point. No theory of human history was proposed, as I recall. The Durants no doubt had their biases, as do we all, but I wasn’t then a sophisticated enough reader to notice. I think the opus is like the Cambridge Ancient History, something you read first to get a sound overview.
@Patricia M: For Made-in-the-US all-cotton T-shirts, you might try these places:
https://www.allamericanclothing.com/collections/women/products/premium-unisex-fine-jersey-tshirt?_pos=7&_fid=4498e1f5f&_ss=c
https://allusaclothing.com/womens/tops/tees-tanks/women-s-short-sleeve-crew-tee-made-in-usa.html
https://www.american-giant.com/collections/womens-tops-1
That last one has more variety, but is way more than I’d be willing to pay for a T-shirt (at those prices, it’s time to learn to sew them myself!). YMMV. I’ve been on a similar hunt for good cotton socks that don’t cost a fortune and also don’t fall apart in the wash. Quality has gone downhill fast in recent years, for the standard brands. Was getting them from No Nonsense, and liked them, but they stopped doing plain white and gray kids’ socks. Arg.
@Chris at Fernglade #7 “if feedback is ignored, then poor decision making is rewarded.”
That is a mighty proverb. I hope it gets passed along. I can see a barbarian warlord trying to instill this message into his sons.
In regards to all the machine gun discussion, here is a link to a description of the Vickers MG from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stevenson that is appropo: https://www.mbeckler.org/blog/?p=215
Also, in terms of artillery it might be time to reread Jules Verne “To the moon and back”. It starts in Baltimore in 1870 or so at a meeting of the Union Artillery Society or somesuch as they discuss using artillery to fire a man to the moon. Verne then sends a man to the moon this way. Sound familiar? Elevator to space anyone?
Smith #74: I’ve been a working-class White Progressive my entire life. I am suspicious of big government and multinational corporations. I support free speech even (especially) for unpopular ideas. I couldn’t care less what consenting adults do to or with each other in their own spaces, but the “consenting” and “adults” parts are non-negotiable. I am generally against war and am critical of immigration as a tool used to depress worker wages and skirt worker safety laws.
When I was 15 those ideas put me to the left of Walter Mondale. 43 years later I’m a Christofascist White Supremacist who’s somewhere to the right of Hitler.
We didn’t walk away from the left. The left ran screaming from us in floppy shoes and a red clown wig.
(Though I gotta admit that 40 years ago “Communists Against Class-Consciousness” was not on my Bingo card).
Patricia Matthews #103: I couldn’t catch a social clue if it jumped in my lap and am certainly on the Autism spectrum. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the people who rejected Wokeness from the start are on the spectrum. 4chan brags of its “weaponized autism” for a reason. When you can’t see social cues and have to judge Woke ideology by its merits and logical coherency, it becomes a very hard sell.
@JMG
Kevin Lynn and Robert Stark mention your theory of catabolic collapse at around 2 and a half minutes in of this interview: https://robertstark.substack.com/p/kevin-lynn-interviews-robert-stark#details
It’s an interesting chat. Good to see these ideas are gradually permeating the intellectual landscape.
Justin Patrick Moore #120, I’ve recently finished reading A Thorn In Their Side about Hilda Murrell, an anti-nuclear campaigner who was murdered in 1984. And the podcast Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder, about a private detective investigating police corruption, who was murdered with an axe in 1987. We can add Wally Hope to the list of inconveniences to the British Establishment who went away.
JMG,
I am rereading parts of Levi and have gotten myself confused. Does the Great Arcanum create the Great Magical Agent? If not, can you explain how they relate to one another? Thank you.
@DaveOTN, if I may, since it sounded like you addressed this to everyone rather than just JMG: That matches my experience as well. There’s definitely no shortage of calls for more births and policies to make that happen here in my northern European country, even if we already have very generous subsidies, parental leave laws etc as it is. Much of it from the right, but also from the other side of the aisle. Like you said, of course it’s unsustainable in the longer term, but so is everything else we do under our system. If they could understand that, they wouldn’t be committed to infinite growth to begin with. They’ll Think Of Something seems to be in full force with anyone who has any real power here, or as the unbearable cliche goes in these parts, “the Green Transition”.
As for the lower tolerance for dissent, hasn’t the whole climate of public debate and “acceptable” topics been narrowing in the West for a while now? Plus extreme touchiness about any topics that could be construed as racist, Progress getting increasingly brittle and, in fairness, how the prophecies of doom from the 20th century didn’t pan out. IIRC Erlich et al made some pretty shrill and confident predictions of imminent disaster, and it’s only fair to point out that they were flat wrong on their own terms. Sometimes I also find myself a bit exasperated with those environmentalists who hammer on about population and nothing else (not saying you’re one of these) no matter the topic at hand. They tend to reduce a very complex predicament to a single issue, just like many on the left do with climate change.
There’s also the fact that it’s very hard to find actual policies you can enact to prevent population growth in a non-coercive way, and that it’s pretty much too late to do much about it at this stage anyway. So in one way it made sense to have the debate in the post-war era when there was still room to (try to) address it. In this way it’s similar to peak oil/true sustainability and our host’s talk about the road not taken and the 30-year vacation from reality.
That said, I think there’s another interesting and more subtle factor here that I haven’t seen mentioned much. I get the sense that it isn’t really about economics or environmentalism at all for a lot of people. Instead, it’s about more diffuse values like vigor, virility and what we might as well call “national strength”.
Not in terms of military power. No, I mean the feeling that a nation (city/town/village) with lots of children is in some sense happy, powerful, virile, successful and thriving, while a polity with a shrinking population is the opposite. Sometimes I see these sentiments even in “deep green” spaces like this blog, with some lamenting the lack of vigor in Western nations as expressed through fewer births. This means accepting a shrinking population feels like a spiritual defeat, even for someone who intellectually acknowledges it’s a good thing from the biosphere’s perspective.
And on the more mundane side, I suspect most people would rather live in a demographically balanced society. Personally I can see the sense in that, too. Having all the age groups around for a variety of perspectives seems healthier than very elder-skewed societies like Italy and Japan. Many rural communities in the rich nations suffer from this too, as only the old are left while the young migrate to cities. Or the other way around for that matter, like with many African countries with extremely young populations, but we don’t tend to hear much from them on the Western internet.
Either way, this would be more of a temporary problem, with a new equilibrium after a while when the population settles at a lower level.
Omer, if you try to start a new religion you’ve already failed. Religions that matter aren’t started by human beings — they’re started by gods, via one or more human prophets or visionaries. Presumably the gods in question already know how things are going to turn out and have accepted that.
Rita, interesting. I may have to read that. I wonder if she’s ever considered studying how American intellectuals go through the same process…
Mark L, except that tens of millions of middle class people have built their entire plans for their future around the idea that their home will appreciate in value, and can be sold off to help pay for their retirements. As it sinks in that this isn’t going to happen, the economic and social impacts will be harsh.
Goedeck, I’m quite familiar with them; we had a set when I was growing up. In retrospect, I’m not impressed; they’re lively, but the Durants paid next to no attention to any civilization outside Europe — they lumped it all together in a single volume at the beginning — and thus failed to use any kind of comparative view to put the events of European history in perspective.
DropBear, the next fifth Wednesday is in August; feel free to bring it up then.
Yorkshire, nah, the Yithians got into the market first.
Chuaquin, it depends on whether enough people outside the profession are interested in keeping it alive.
Stephen, nope. I’m not interested in rewarding a murderer by providing a forum for his ideas.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Daniel, I’m delighted to hear this. Thank you!
Other Owen, it’s a harbinger of how wars will be fought as long as there’s the abundant energy needed for factories, truck transport, etc. From here we can expect things to gradually slide down to some more sustainable mode of warfare.
Patricia M, it strikes me as very good advice.
Justin, exactly. All the waste heat becomes, ahem, heat. Really successful renewable technologies do that.
Scotlyn, that’s an excellent point.
Chris, a mystery indeed — and yeah, keeping one’s distance from such people is a good plan.
Justin, oh, it’s much more than that. A vast amount of the paper wealth that keeps the US economy afloat consists of the notional value of real estate. As that shifts into negative numbers, expect a lot of financial carnage. As for those overpriced tickets, what they’re doing is signaling that they only want attendees of a certain social class. There are a lot of class barriers like that these days.
Kurt, interesting. I’ll check that out as time permits.
Dobbs, interesting. If it can be made sturdy enough to handle field conditions it might be an interesting thing for an army to try.
Neptunesdolphins, welcome back! Sorry to hear you had some trouble. With regard to the global warming thing, that’s complex, and I probably need to do another post on it soon. Partly, belief in global warming these days is a class marker — if you repeat it as an act of faith on every possible occasion, it proves that you’re one of the Good People. But there’s more to it, of course. As for A World Full of Gods, it’s been revised throughout, and several sections have been substantially rewritten.
Void, you might consider the Sphere of Protection, which I covered in detail in a sequence of posts here.
Neptunesdolphins, thanks for this. I may have to look into Cahn.
Roman, because it makes huge amounts of money for the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Once you start the transition process you’re a permanent patient, and the money just keeps rolling in. Here in the US, those industries are hugely profitable, so our extremely corrupt governments are happy to further their agenda in exchange for a cut.
Clay, I haven’t followed him closely enough to guess.
Bob Brown, that’s a common misconception. One of the things that happens when you learn to cause changes in consciousness in accordance with will is that you learn how to become conscious of things that are excluded from the very narrow notion of reality that’s treated as the only real world in modern industrial societies. One of the things that most people perceive first when they do that is the life force. That’s as real as a rock, and yes, you can do various things with it, ranging from healing (that’s how acupuncture works) to martial arts to nasty stuff of the sort the villain in the story engages in.
Croatoan, nah, the deserts won’t extend that far east. It’s the western half of the continent that’s turning into desert, probably as far east as the Mississippi. Further east it’ll be dryer, but not that much dryer.
Anonymous, that seems quite plausible to me. I suspect, though, that the contraction of the internet will follow the collapse of faith in progress, which is already stirring around us.
Luke, I’m delighted to hear this. Thank you!
Random, if you understand how they fit together, you understand the Great Arcanum.
@ JMG in comments: ” One of the lessons you learn if you have Aspergers syndrome is that You. Do. Not. Know. What. Other. People. Think.”
Well, ok. But how does ANYBODY know what other people think? What other people think is inside their heads. It is not visible or palpable or audible, like what they do or say. To know what other people think would be (to me) a superpower. Like telepathy, or reading auras.
What sort of crystal is used for healing and how is it done?
Oh dear gods, something just hit me. There’s something that promises to make the collapse of the current internet a mess, and probably much, much faster than anyone currently expects.
As it sinks in that the internet can’t pay for itself, investors will take their money out. Once this happens and the internet starts to shrink, it’ll be a death blow to Progress; which is, as you said, already failing. So, now the collapse in Progress feeds off of the collapse of the internet; meanwhile, as faith in Progress collapses, more and more people will look at things and realize there are other ways to do things, that don’t involve the internet, and walk away, further reducing the internet’s economic viability. This generates a positive feedback loops, and the result is that both could end up collapsing a great deal before things settle down.
The apartments that are being built chock-a-block in many urban areas, or on the fringe of these urban areas will certainly be useful further down the long descent as they tend to be small, well insulated, and walkable ( to some extent anyway). But I think in the short term many of them represent a kind of Real Estate Fracking gimmick. In Portland they are still starting and building more apartments of all kinds, but the population of the city has been in decline for 3 years now with no end in sight. My ” stuff on the deck” metric tells me that many of the ones that have opened recently are half full at best.
From what I know the developers get funded by banks and such to build these places, then immediately sell them to Real Estate Investment Trusts ( or other entities) which finance them with Securitized debt. In they end they are pretty much being funded by printed money, like fracked oil. The cities, the developers, the construction companies, the finance guys and the management firms ( which are contracted to run the apartments) are all making money as long as the financing comes through. One day the merry-go-round will stop and they will have to be paid for by actually collecting rent.
neptunesdolphins @ 114,
Congratulations on your recovery and best wishes for your continued good health. I am afraid I have to disagree with you about: “Wolf’s idea of that non-Jewish Gods are evil is interesting to me.” (Keeping in mind that you are of course entitled to find interesting anything you like.)
I find Wolf’s remarks to be a shocking misrepresentation, at the very least, of what we do know about Mediterranean pantheons. What you did not repeat, but what she stated in her earlier essay that was discussed here, was something to the effect that
the Greeks got their gods from the Canaanites, taking it on herself to rewrite Herodotus. That assertion is simply not true. The Greek pantheon has varied origins, and I think I do no violence to centuries of scholarship if I point out that Zeus is of course the Indo-European sky god; his various consorts, including Hera, are autochthonous goddesses of earth and so on. Athena may well have come from Africa; mythology seems to support that conclusion. Wolf was repeating the idiocies of Martin Bernal who went to great lengths to construct a Canaanite origin for Greek religion, while throwing Africa the bone of Black Athena. This, he claimed, was accomplished by the Egypto-Hyksos, who, even if some did settle in Greece, would have arrived long after Mycenean worship of the Greek immortals had already been established, as archeology has shown. Never mind that there was no such thing as “Egypto-Hyksos”, the Egyptians hated their Shepherd Kings and drove them out as soon as they could. The Mesopotamian Innana, later Ishtar, does appear in Greece as Aphrodite, but her origin is in Sumeria.
@Dennis: my kids love Totoro (and all the other Miyazaki movies)– to the best of my knowledge, it’s the most popular children’s movie of all time, worldwide.
@NeptunesDolphins: I’ve been noticing that in books, as well– I love a good book about natural history, botany, and ecosystems– recently attempted to read one on fungi called “Mycotopia” and found it so unbearably political (I really just wanted to read about how mycelial networks function– I don’t care about the sexual proclivities and political stances of the people who study the stuff!) I gave up and returned it to the library halfway through, after realizing I’d just skimmed two entire chapters looking for something about fungi, and came up empty. You’d think a book about mushrooms would be fairly safe from zombie takeover by political-topics-of-the-week, but no, it’s all in there: climate change, gender wars, the works. Another, better one, “The Secret Life of Trees” stayed on-topic, but seemed to bring up “climate change” regularly like clockwork– no content with it, just… it was like the publisher told them they had to mention it every X number of pages in order to publish, so they shoehorned it in just enough to meet the requirement. It came off like a nervous tic.
@Kenaz: re: autism and noncompliance: I don’t know how it looks from the male side, but from the female/autistic side, the world is already a bizarre social machine governed by scads of rules that everybody else is born with a handbook for, and of which nobody will give us a copy. We do our best to cadge together some cliff notes, try to figure out the rules on our own, but it’s perpetually inadequate, and we are constantly putting a foot in it– loud, irritating, and socially inappropriate. There are a couple of things this does for us, WRT The Current Thing:
1) if we are over the age of, say, 25, we’ve already conducted the necessary experiments in Fitting In, and we know that no matter how hard we try to follow the rules, wear the right shoes, join the right clubs, etc… we are never, ever going to be socially acceptable. It’s not an achievable goal. It’s always gonna be stressful, but the best way to reduce the stress is to *stop trying so hard*, accept that this is the way things are, figure out what you can do with your life that doesn’t require you to do impossible things, and find people who tolerate your weirdness.
2) Wokeness is clearly, obviously, an evil plot to *vastly increase* the number and rigidity of incomprehensible social rules everybody has to live by (and make sure they change all the time. You can’t keep up unless you download the daily amendments bulletin directly into your brain!), in the most cutthroat possible way, so that only the most keenly socially aware/manipulative people can survive and thrive, and the socially clueless are roadkill from the start. We’d be nuts to buy into it.
3) Under-25 auties who are still conducting the necessary experiments… sigh. I think they’re getting shoved head-first into the meat grinder. Particularly the girls. Some days it looks like a deliberate extermination program by social manipulators against autists. I thought the ostracism and ridicule were awful when I was that age. But at least nobody tried to convince me that chemical sterilization and chopping off body parts would fix it. Who knows? I might’ve believed them.
Re: real estate collapse
Does anyone have any idea as to which of these two scenarios is more likely to play out?
1. The usual bubble-pop dynamics, a serious economic downturn, and a declining population combine to crash housing values by 50-75% or more. This leads to lots of foreclosures and short sales, which are gobbled up by wealthy people, betting that prices will eventually rise again and at least they can get some rental income. The proportion of homeowners declines as the investment class expands their grip on land and real estate.
2. The usual bubble-pop dynamics, a serious economic downturn, and a declining population combine to crash housing values by 50-75% or more. Given that the oversupply of housing appears poised to get worse and high vacancy rates make rental income an iffy proposition, investment money mostly stays away – fleeing instead toward precious metals, currency exchanges, and trade goods. Eventually, a house on some land or a condo in the city can be had for the cost of mid-sized sedan, allowing all but the poorest citizens to own real estate.
I certainly hope for #2, but I suppose it depends on:
–the rate of population decline, and
–whether any sort of supply-side destruction comes into play, which could look like
–investors buying houses and intentionally keeping a proportion of them vacant (artificial scarcity, which seems to be happening already to some extent), or
–laws getting passed to mandate widespread demolition, e.g. of any house containing lead paint or asbestos, or
–disasters, desertification, conflicts, and sea level rise rendering a large number of homes and regions uninhabitable, thereby matching or exceeding the rate of population decline.
Hi John Michael,
and yeah, keeping one’s distance from such people is a good plan. Yeah, you’ve gotta have a strategy. 😉 And if you may here indulge one of my hobbies, people watching, I’d have to suggest that what the ticklish, eerie, part of my mind tells me, is that such people at their core, do not like themselves – and interpretation of their actions can begin from that point. It is worthwhile noting, that if they do not like themselves, then they will doubly hate anyone who is remotely kind to them. It’s oddly more likely a female thing that, and I have this odd hunch that the pick up artists prey on such people.
Dunno, but like martial arts, I learned about people so as to deflect their energies. No point absorbing that rubbish – and there’s always more of them.
The climate forecasts are pointing strongly towards an El Nino (generally hot and dry conditions), except that: More heavy rain imminent for central, northern Australia. There’s something strange going on dude! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
re: the accelerating Long Descent
Seems like there’s a lot of folks out there these days with a lot of different and bizarre ideas about what’s going wrong. Like, wacky shale. Feels like it’s almost ready to boil over to me. And any faction of the fallout can be lumped with every other faction of the fallout by the official voice, and declared paranoid, fringe loonies. The divisiveness and variety of competing theories almost feels intentional.
Although I’m not suggesting, explicitly, that those sleeping entities who are waking up have anything to do with it…;)
@Methylethyl – thanks for the websites! Will take a look.
@JMG – refresh my memory about the Great Year.
To Hosea Tanatu (#33), thank you for your insightful thoughts on the phenomenon of conformity — in particular, your hypothesized factor #1, the inability of some people to pick up on the social signals which would lead others to conform to a group consensus. I had never, until this thread, considered that as a possible factor.
To Robert Mathiesen (#47): the idea of non-conformity (or, presumably, conformity as well) being at least partially genetically linked is an intriguing one. Alas, I can find no corroborating evidence for any non-conformity at all similar to my own within my own lineage or extended family. That fact is, of course, purely anecdotal.
To EI (#57): The fleeing of an insular religious community is an interesting possible analogy or subset of non-conformity. Again, I had never considered it before, and thank you for bringing into the discussion. I’ll have to mull over its potential relationship to non-conformity in the broader context.
To DropBear (#89): The idea of our ‘educational’ (sic) system sorting for conformity is an excellent point, and indeed observation. It is also likely the reason why I was unable to finish my university BS degree, as what I was forced to endure in the course of seeking it became exponentially more BS the closer I came to finishing it.
JMG, if you’re going to write about climate change again, I’m told that the way to get people to listen to you is to make sure you only say things that will make them feel hope. Yeah. I know it’s unsolicited advice, but I don’t want anyone else to make the same mistakes I did. Do. Intend to keep doing*. But then, I’m a known crank, not a respectable person on the internet 😉 So I can get away with that.
Don’t say things like, “The only actual carbon mitigation strategy on [Thought Leader municipality’s Very Professional presentation diagram] was energy efficiency, and all the others were actually government subsidized vertical wealth transfers for the current fossil fuel and mining companies to switch from the fossil fuels and elements they’re out of to lithium and other rare earth metals which are wildly unprofitable if they aren’t being subsidized. And that mining is really, really water and land destruction intensive – it makes the oil sands look like a wildlife conservation area, frankly – which will radically exacerbate the existing drought and civil strife in, primarily, the Global South. Such international “foreign investment”, Canada’s role in foreign mining, in particular, has been directly linked to the rise human trafficking and other abuses of indigenous populations, which is against the UNDRIP we signed, federally, a few years ago.”
Don’t, for the love of Mike, point out that the infrastructure required to build out the electric car charging stations alone, let alone the cars themselves, will exceed by several time the entire known global copper and cobalt reserves (don’t send everyone at the meeting a link to the UK study about the cobalt through the Zoom chat when asked what you mean by that). Don’t say anything about the lifespan, recyclability, and fragility of the “renewable” power source we are going to switch to to get to net zero (don’t mention that steel is made using lots and lots of coal).
When a smarter person is kind enough to slow his speech right down for you, so you can catch up to everyone else in the room, and then circles the number on the graph in red pen, so you can see it better, and says, “Now, Sara, this is the tonnes of carbon your municipality is allotted from the global budget before we exceed the 1.5C threshold- ” (Don’t interrupt to ask what happens then? Something bad to someone? And if we don’t hit that specific target everything remains fine?), “- and this is where you are today. This is simple math. You just subtract that amount and that’s how much you have left, so you have to make sure your municipality only emits that amount.”
Don’t then ask how you’d know that’s how much, because The Science (I’m not exaggerating at all, “The Science” was invoked) tells us that much. Are there carbon flux monitors over my town, and are we under a hermetically sealed shield that allows that specific number to be calculated? No, it turns out, all these numbers are calculated… no, no one here can tell you what the assumptions that went into the model were. Do you have a better one?
Don’t then say, well, no, I don’t, but this group of people did, and they checked it, over several decades, and they were pretty much bang on, and this other lady named Maya gave a whole podcast about the math (which is, obviously, well beyond my education and training, as an M.Sc. in Environmental Science, so I just take her word for it). Then, when the guy you’ve been sparring talking to this whole time busts out with, “We don’t need to take the time to convince people this needs to be done, The Science tells us what needs to be done! During WW2, the government didn’t convince people the Nazis were bad, it told them what had to be done and people did it because they believed the information they were getting” (no, he won’t read any of my war history books, I asked, and I probably don’t need to tell you what his Facebook feed said people like you and me were about three years ago), do NOT, I repeat, do not retort that if it’s war metaphors we’re going with, how about Vietnam, and maybe some of us aren’t interested in sending GIs overseas to commit atrocities again. It makes the rest of the conference attendees uncomfortable. (Fortunately, making other people uncomfortable makes me feel powerful, and I can’t be fired, only not re-elected in three years, so I was fine ;-)). (Unlike MIKA, I don’t ask why nobody likes me anymore).
I had lunch the next day with the downtown business association, and housing affordability came up. Someone fretted that they were worried what it would be like in 20 years when their kids were in the market. So I tried hope! I said, “Don’t worry, it won’t be like this. This is unsustainable, and what can’t be sustained, won’t.” The whole table went quiet but they didn’t seem to be basking in hope. I don’t know why. I hope you can do better than me!
*I hadn’t intended to, I really did try to be good. I tried to create my own little restoration science project in my own front yard to keep me out of trouble, because Dr. Jung said that unused creativity was the source of all evil (or something like that), and I don’t want to be evil! I was monitoring the species composition over time when I stopped mowing the easement between the fence and sidewalk. I was having a great time with the transects, and photographs, and my ID books. People would ask me what I was doing, and I’d tell them. I got asked a lot, and I think I told everyone around. I was going to provide it to the HAT (Habitat Acquisition Trust) Good Neighbour program staff for data on marginal land value. But then one night when I was gone for about two hours a kindly neighbour mowed it for me, anonymously. So now I have more time to focus my creative energies on my job, representing the voting public’s interests! I guess magic really does work; thanks neighbour.
Dear wise and kindly ones, I am hoping that you may be able to help me with my weight problem – middle aged spread, in my mid fifties, needing to shed a couple of stone, trying to eat right and modestly for many moons now and it just ain’t shifting. I feel trapped, heavy and so desperate to change this situation. Any advice please would be so welcome – what works? What am I missing? My body is clinging onto its fat stores for dear life. Help!
Different subject altogether: once a soul has developed a robust mental body, finished the human stage if you will, is the etheric body left behind like the physical? Is the astral the “lowest” plane we inhabit thereafter? My guess is yes to both, since the etheric body is also shed via the second death when we reassume our enduring form between lives, but I’m open to correction!
Thanks, JMG. Yes, Desmet mentions that book a lot, along with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. I’m not sure exactly how far down this rabbit hole I want to go. There’s a lot to read out there (just finished Black Elk Speaks, thanks to whomever on this forum recommended it recently), and the mass formation stuff is scary.
It seems like mass media is a big part of mass formation. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a Carrington Event before the next one happens.
Larkrise,
I’ve lost a stone and a half since Christmas, but I’ve worked really hard at it. Put about 400 miles on my sneakers, done interval training at work – crunches, pushups, etc – and adjusted my diet in certain ways that don’t always leave me smiling. You may be doing all the same things, I don’t know; I know it’s just more difficult for some to drop weight than others.
But one thing that I’ve witnessed people do and been impressed with is the, I think it’s called, the King and Pauper diet. Or something like that. I.E. eat your biggest meal in the morning, like a king, a modest lunch, and a very meager dinner, like a pauper.
No one size fits all for sure, but I’ve been blown away by a couple of guys I know who did this.
Talking 100+ lbs.
Scotlyn, maybe so, but neurotypical people seem to have much less trouble interpreting body language, nonverbal cues, facial expressions, and all the rest of the stuff that I can’t read at all. Maybe they’re just better at faking it or something, but I had to get used, from childhood on, to the fact that most people assumed as a matter of course that I would pick up on things that most other people seemed to be able to perceive just fine, and I couldn’t perceive at all.
Ben, I have no idea. That’s a New Age thing that I never got into. Anyone else?
Anonymous, good. That’s what I’ve been expecting — oh, and factor in the collapse of advertising revenues driven by the same process.
Clay, yep. The crash is not going to be pretty.
Mark, that’s a good question. To my mind the second is most likely, because it’s not just real estate that’s in trouble. The entire pyramid scheme of paper wealth is creaking and groaning as the dollar-printing operation behind it begins to run into the nemesis of every Ponzi scheme, the point at which you run out of suckers; when it beguns to take on water in a hurry, many different kinds of investments will lose money all at once, and the funds needed to snap up real estate are likely to be very hard to come by. But we’ll see.
Chris, the weather is getting very, very weird. We just had a “New England winter” with negligible snowfall — it just rained a lot — and now we seem to be heading into a New England summer with plenty of clouds, rain, and cool days. Bizarre.
Grover, the proliferation of strange ideas is to my mind a good sign. It shows that people are genuinely aware that something is very wrong, and the official explanations don’t explain it.
Patricia M, 25,920 years, the time it takes the sun’s position at the spring equinox to go all the way around the zodiac.
Sarad, thanks, but I have my own way of approaching things. Since I reside comfortably out here on the uttermost fringes, far beyond the realm of respectability, I don’t have to cater to the pretensions of fools — and the things I have to say will seep in through the crawlspaces a little at a time, as evasions fail. Stay tuned!
Larkrise, huge corporations make billions of dollars a year convincing you that the ordinary process of putting on weight with age is something horrible and pathological. There’s no magical way to make you conform to the fake standards being pushed at you by media and the medical industry, because those standards are designed to be unattainable by most people. You can go on making yourself miserable, or you can concentrate instead on ways of eating and exercising that keep you feeling flexible, vigorous, and vital, and ignore the number on the scale. The latter tends to have much better results.
Grover, not yet. Human souls can have three bodies at a time. We shed the physical body when we finish evolving the mental body, and thereafter the etheric body is our densest body. Then, after long ages, we evolve a spiritual body, and shed the etheric body — and after even more ages, we evolve a causal body and shed the astral body. That’s why the mental body is so important; it’s our first permanent body.
Slink, mass formation is a complicated thing, and it doesn’t always work out the way the people who set it in motion want it to go…
Clay Dennis (#122) “But it seems as though we are well past the time of Marcus Aurelius. In fact I would say it is 400 AD in the American Empire and the Visigoths are banging on the gates.”
I think it would be quite difficult to distinguish 400 AD of the American Empire from a third-century crisis, from which Rome did largely recover. (Especially since the third-century crisis was bad enough that it left large gaps in our information about those days.)
Thought in regards Russia Wagner coup. Total mind f for me. Was the whole episode a putin psyop or legit? Plays into western propaganda that russia is weakening. Notice putin gave immediate clemency-message loud and clear in russia war heroes get a lot of priveledge and get away with things. Sign up, da? Then one learns the cia knew days in advance of the plot- did they get advance copies of the script from their buddy contacts in the kremlin? Lol
@Scotlyn: it’s true. We can’t know what others are thinking. But apparently normal people can project their own thought processes onto others, and be reasonably correct about what others are thinking, most of the time. It is one of the great mysteries!
Meanwhile, when the rest of us not-normal people attempt the same thing, we are mostly wrong. Psychologists call this “lack of Theory of Mind”. But they never turn the mirror around on themselves and ask if they can predict what *we* are thinking with any accuracy. Normal people are only good at it when presented with someone who thinks like they do. When they encounter someone whose thoughts and perceptions are markedly different from their own, they’re just as bad at it as we are. I cannot count the number of disastrous interactions I’ve had with perfectly normal, functional people, where they literally could not hear what I was saying, because it wasn’t what they thought I would say… i.e. wasn’t what *they* would’ve said in the same circumstances. Their brains just pluck out some keywords, and then fill in the gaps using a mental model of their own thought processes.
Mark L offers some scenarios for housing price collapse of 50-75%. I don’t think either of those are likely.
Remember two things. Firstly, economic downturns are generally gradual – on the order of 5% at most. Go look at a historical chart of US GDP, cover up the dates at the bottom and you’ll struggle to find the Great Depression. Obviously, millions were made unemployed and hungry – but those who did have money kept buying up and building housing.
Big crashes only come with government action, such as lockdowns, foreign invasion and that sort of thing.
Secondly, massive price declines can happen in one area while another goes up, leaving overall prices the same. When manufacturing jobs left Detroit, housing didn’t become cheaper for people there – entire neighbourhoods were simply abandoned, while the people who could afford it went elsewhere.
Considering economic downturn and population decline, that’s what you’ll see happening in a country. House by house a neighbourhood or town is abandoned. We see this in Japan – but they still have among the highest housing costs in the world. The cost of where people don’t want to live trends to zero, the cost of where they do want to live trends to infinity.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses
But you speak of the US. I do not think the USA’s population is on a decline path, because it has high migration, both legal and illegal. As an American you focus on what’s wrong with your country. But view it from the perspective of a subsistence farmer from Guatemala or El Salvador, or cartel-dominated northern Mexico, or the climatically and socially on-fire Middle East. That’s going to take a while to change.
Lastly, on a more general note about real estate: there’s nowhere else for well-off Westerners to put their savings. Free trade killed off manufacturing, and deregulation turned everything into shopping malls and big box stores and killed off small businesses, so those places where people with savings historically invested their money are mostly gone. All that leaves is real estate. It’s either that or Ponzi schemes like Bitcoin.
@jmg and others, have you ever read https://theethicalskeptic.com/2020/02/16/the-climate-change-alternative-we-ignore-to-our-peril/ ?
I follow this guy on twitter (for his statistical analysis of covid stuff). His above article on another climate theory is interesting.
His latest tweets (like https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1674484333220884480 and https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1674478071045300240) are moving into showing we’ve got a lot of heat recently dumped into the sea.
Here in Chicago we’ve had the worst air quality. I am pretty healthy, but even I am beginning to feel this. It is feeling like more than just a distant wildfire.
thx
Jerry
JMG –
I’ve read here or on Dreamwidth how you expect the Democratic party and their associated animalculae to, in an exemplary showing of enantiodromia, unironically embrace white supremacy within something like the next decade.
I’m curious if you’ve considered the idea that this phenomenon may instead present – rather, has already presented – in the guise of anti-whiteness, the which is already so lustfully displayed in so many left-leaning circles, speaking as they do of Whitness as an impersonal evil, systemic pattern, faulty idea to be eradicated, etc? Looking into Wagner’s “Jewishness in Music” a little bit just now reminded me of nothing so much as the various opportuno-activist-penned diatribes against whiteness in vogue at the moment.
Thank you Robert and Mike L!
As for Rhode Island, Captain Van Erp did a good job of showing that side of the state’s history and a few other good tales, like the one of Sarah Helen Whitman and Poe. Roger Williams did a good job.
I’ll keep looking… so far it’s been far more enjoyable than the evergreen state.
@JMG,
“if you understand how they fit together, you understand the Great Arcanum.”
Ha! Well, I guess recognizing that they could fit together is a step in the right direction at least. 😉
Thank you!
JMG and all,
Any good historical books you like about the United States? I am looking for something than more than thorough, has a good sense of the vibes back then and showcases some of it’s liveliness and stories. No particular period, from the colonies to the kickstart of the industrial times.
Brendhelm, the solution is already here. Apparently all developed countries and others like China have fertility rates below replacement rates. A declining population will eventually mean a decrease in resource use.
The only problem here in America is that Washington has countered with its open door immigration policy to keep population growing and the system going. But I don’t think that will succeed much longer. If we can get global population down to about a billion or less by 2200, I think we can avoid a major collapse.
Also –
JMG & Clay Dennis #10:
I, admittedly, have never followed the news terribly closely (though closer than some, I suppose) and was til now unfamiliar with our friend Mr. Kristoff. I looked him up and found some pictures.
I haven’t put much study into psychimetry, but good Lord, if that isn’t the most shockingly empty-eyed person I have ever seen…! The cost of perpetual self-delusion, I guess.
@Patricia Mathews #51
If I have to buy not made int eh USA, I look to Maggies Organics.. The socks are made in USA, and.a few skirts, the rest is very much real fair trade and supports small business mostly in South America.
I love Duckworth as an entirely USA, sheep to fabric to sewin. They have their Vapor line of shirts that would be breathable T shirts but of course are wool, not at all what you would think f\of as wool, summer weight, breathablehttps://www.duckworthco.com/collections/womens-shirts
Blue Canoe is sewn in California, https://www.bluecanoe.com/collections/womens-organic-tops
I have a couple from this company too, farm Fresh, sewn in California Marin county TThinner fashion cotton, not as thick as a Hynes beefy T, although I have 2 long sleeve for winter layering https://farmfreshclothingco.com/pages/organic-tees
If you search under made in USA, I know there are T shirt makers, but I haven’t ubought fro others to know.
We often buy from Dharmas and dye our own. You buy clothing blanks, which are white prepared for dye, and they sell dyes. It is easy hundreds of colors and very colorfast thru lots of washings. We use a 5 gallon bucket outside to dye in, just stir around with a stick. It is easy and therapeutic. Use the search function on the website to see all of the made in USA clothing blanks. Here is the link where I researched for made in USA women’s clothing. We have also dyed napkins, baby clothes, canvas shopping bags https://www.dharmatrading.com/home/made-in-the-usa-womens-clothing.html
I forgot to hit paste with the link to Maggies Organics, https://maggiesorganics.com/tops/
Lady Cutekitten,
If you see this, I replied to your question on my Divination offering.
Jstn, me, I wonder how much money Prigozhyn got from the CIA, which he’s now pocketed and carried with him to Belarus.
Jerry D, I have indeed. It’s an intriguing possibility. Myself, I suspect that both theories are correct — in the real world, nothing has only one cause, and current variations in climate are likely to result from solar variation plus excess heat plumes rising through the mantle plus CO2 and other greenhouse gases trapping more heat closer to the planet.
Ibn Zaryab, possibly, but it also happens that people embrace an extreme form of one set of beliefs before they veer suddenly to an extreme form of its opposite. It’s quite remarkable to watch, for example, how often a brief flirtation with Satanism precedes conversion to conservative Christianity.
Random, you’re most welcome.
Augusto, I wish. I’ll be interested to hear what others come up with.
Regarding housing in a period of population decline:
I think what a lot of people seem to forget is that no tenant = zero rental income. That isn’t as much an issue when housing prices are going up, as you are still gaining equity, and it also isn’t an issue if a dip in housing is brief and your pockets are deep enough (or your income from other investments substantial enough) to pull through the vacancy period until you can find another tenant.
The problem is that unoccupied houses still need to be maintained. Often they will also have to have some utilities turned on, either to avoid condemnation by the city or to prevent damage from things like freeze/thaw cycles. With no tenant, the landlord must shoulder 100% of these costs (paying a property management company to take care of maintenance is still shouldering 100% of the cost), so even if you paid cash for the house and have no mortgage at any interest rate, the vacant house is costing you money. The fewer tenants per house there are around, the harder the calculus of artificial scarcity becomes.
In addition, regarding Mark L.’s #1 and #2 – most likely there will be investors who try for #1. Others will liquidate precisely because of #2 (or because they have to), and this actually makes the prospects for #1 worse.
And I haven’t mentioned property taxes yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if municipalities, seeking to find some way to keep what they consider essential services going, try to raise property taxes, especially on absentee landlords who aren’t living there and don’t vote in local elections but who have vacant properties just sitting there. The investors will lobby against it / hand out bribes / whatever? Great, that also costs money.
(Plus, as the descent gets further in there’s also the increasing risk of law enforcement non-compliance and/or legal system breakdown. What happens to “your” property if a non-paying tenant won’t pay rent and the sheriff refuses, even with a court order, to evict, or you’re dealing with warlords who don’t care what certain pieces of paper have to say about whose land it is?)
How much wiggle room do you think there is on desert to the Mississippi? I’m not sure I wish to stick around to watch that start.
“You can go on making yourself miserable, or you can concentrate instead on ways of eating and exercising that keep you feeling flexible, vigorous, and vital, and ignore the number on the scale”
That’s really the truth. My mantra is “two miles a day keeps the doctor away.” It takes 40 minutes unless I stop to watch something interesting. Avoid between meal snacks, skip the sugar-water, chug down whatever fresh fruit is in season (currently raspberries, the apricots are coming soon). My weight has been around 155 since the Navy.
Augusto, if you want to understand the early USA, the place to start is Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Henry Adams wrote a brilliant history of the Jefferson Administration. I would suggest that mid 20thC writers are not to be disdained. Bernard Bailyn, Bruce Catton, Esther Forbes, Samuel Eliot Morison, to name a few wrote in engaging fashion for a literate but non-specialist audience.
JMG – yes, right. I suppose what I’m sayinhñg is that they have veered from being opposed to racial discrimination/racism into a race-based judgement system such as the one I mentioned, rather than veering from sorry-for-being-white into white supremacy. In any case, I guess time will tell.
JMG – ah, now I see what you mean. From one *extreme form* to another. Okay, yes – that makes lots of sense.
Greetings JMG and All,
Has anyone read the “Magical Knowledge” three volume series of books by Josephine
McCarthy? All three of the books are now in a revised 2nd edition.
They’re basically a magical “toolbox” of techniques that can be used with or
without an existing tradition or practice. They can add light on many areas of
magical practice. These books also provide some explanations for the “why” of
many magical practices as well. Thoughts Pro or Con?
Also, any thoughts on her “Quareia” Magic Course, which is pretty extensive!
This is an expanded course in much greater depth than the books, while remaining
essentially independent of any existing tradition/ paradigm, though to be fair
there are some Egyptian overtones in places. Both the series of books, and the
course work itself are in a progrression of: Apprentice -> Initiate -> Adept
context. The course is available (Open Source Free Online http://www.quareia.com) or in
book form, from the usual book outlets. Both the books and the course have been
around for a while, thoughts, Pro or Con?
Thanks
The CodeSmith
Does anybody have any idea how Uranus in Gemini is gonna work out in mundane astrology? I know Uranus is malefic, and that’s bad, but apparently a malefic in its fall, as Uranus is now, being in Taurus, is even worse. I imagine Uranus being malefic meaning it goes through a sign and just wrecks everything symbolized by that sign, although Uranus does have kind of an innovative creative aspect as well, so I guess it destroys a bunch of stuff and puts dangerous, harsh, shiny new stuff in its place. I think Taurus in mundane astrology symbolizes the home, or agriculture, or everyday life, or something? Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. But I don’t know what Gemini symbolizes in mundane astrology.
I’d appreciate being schooled!
I have been reading the Gospel of Thomas, gospel of Judas, gospel of Mary Magdalene.
It becomes soon obvious why these books were set aside from the chosen cannon of the Bible.
Very powerful stuff. Powerful for individuals as well as for the collective of human kind.
Hard to square the church (or anything human) as a any kind of real authority, and Jesus waxing on about infinite dimensions, and races of beings inhabiting worlds no earthly bound mind can comprehend. Places even angels can not go to or know.
@Hackenschmidt #159
Well, we have seldom in recorded history seen anything quite akin to the population declines projected over the next century by the Standard Model of the Limits to Growth, so if that is even close to correct I think you might be surprised.
I’ll also point out that housing has been quite cheap in many parts of the US until very recently. In 2016 one could buy a decent house in my hometown of Renville, Minnesota for about $50k. Now those houses are selling for around $200k. Given that the bubble has created a ~400% increase, I don’t think a corresponding ~75% drop is unrealistic. Looking at Zillow for Detroit, there are still lots of houses for sale for under $50k which is definitely *not* the case in cities which have not experienced an equivalent population loss.
@Jerry #160
I follow The Ethical Skeptic and have argued with him about this hypothesis on Twitter. I really don’t think that mantle heat plumes can function as a climatic heat *source* because the flux is still infinitesimally small (more than 1000x less) relative to the solar heat flux. That said, I am warming up to the idea that mantle heat plumes can cause a change in boundary conditions in the deep oceans that can then influence ocean overturning dynamics with a profound impact on climate. This is akin to the way that space weather (energetic particles, mainly from the Sun, which carry a negligible amount of actual energy relative to sunlight) can influence weather and climate by changing the boundary conditions at the top of the atmosphere. So I think there may well be something to his theory, and I look forward to seeing whether it is validated in the years ahead.
@Hackenschmidt , Real estate prices in the US declined by an average of 40% from the top in 2008 to the bottom in 2012. They would have most likely stayed there , or gone lower if the fed had not blown another bubble in asset prices by pumping funny money in to the system. They are declining now and this time the fed is probably out of tricks. The US has now squandered its exorbitant privilege to print money out of thin air and convince ( or bully) people around the world to take it in exchange for goods. As the geopolitical debacle in the Ukraine draws to a close so will our ability to artificially elevate the value of real estate, stocks, bonds and other tokens of wealth. Housing prices will burn like a Leopard tank on the Steppes of Central Asia. The money the ” well off” have to prop up the prices of real estate is mostly in the form of ” tokens of wealth” dependent on the US financial Ponzi scheme. When this merry-go-round of delusional wealth comes to halt the ” well off” will find their fictional wealth will have disappeared as well, and any tidbits they have left will be needed for food or heat.
Hey Augusto. Any updates on the cell salts?
Larkrise #151, have a look at Precision Nutrition – https://www.precisionnutrition.com/. Following that system dropped my weight from 106kg to 63kg (having to halve my consumption of goats milk due to supply issues during lockdown also helped).
Grover #154, the King and Pauper Diet sounds like an inversion of the Warrior Diet. That’s where you only eat one meal a day, in the last four hours before you go to bed. I wouldn’t want to do it but it sounds good for people short of time, and those who are wired up so once they start eating it’s difficult to stop. Plus I thought it would be a good way to eat if there was a food shortage. You’re eating less food overall, but you may also be eating the biggest single meals of your life, and every day has a happy ending. 🙂
#161 I get the sense that the war in Ukraine is providing a path for a subset of the mainstream centre-left to go over to the hard right. A variety of them are learning to love militarism in a way that would seem surprising given their views a few years ago.
I’m not sure about white supremacy, but it is telling that there was so much more attention given to the war in Ukraine, a war affecting white people than something of similar magnitude in for example Central Africa is.
Hey JMG
The mentioning of the “Instant legolas” is another thing that I’ve wanted to write to you about, but never got around to. Since it has been mentioned by dob I may as well fix that.
Essentially it is a arrow-magazine with trigger system that you can clamp to a bow in order to turn it into a weapon similar to the Chinese repeating crossbow. It was invented by the slingshot enthusiast Joerg sprave, who speculated on wether it could have been made in medieval times. Instead of just assuming that, he got another YouTuber who specialises in medieval warfare named Tod cutler to experiment with it.
Tod not only recreated the device with medieval technology, but got a longbow archer to test it using a 95 and a 120 pound bow. He managed to empty the 5 arrow magazine in the time that it took him to shoot 2 arrows using only his bow. However he complained that it was hard work to use the device due to its weight and the different posture he needed to use for the weapon. It also seemed to mildly decrease accuracy.
They both speculated that with practice and some design modification the performance of the device could be made better.
Something else I should mention is that there is a precedent to this weapon, however it wasn’t designed to increase firing speed. I read that some Central Asian nomads invented a tube that could be attached to their bows to allow them to shoot arrows and crossbow bolts too short to shoot unaided.
@ Larkrise #151 – one thing to look into is to ask the question – what nourishment is my body missing, desperately hunting for, and never getting?
No one can say where this exploration might take you, but if you will have them, I send you my blessings.
Borfur, I’m one of these who sometimes forget what I wanted to write.
Anonymopus and JMG, about the Internet, I would assume that the state will prop up the Internet at all costs because of the religion of progress, this basically forbids the Internet to contract. I’m not sure how this will play out, but I can’t imagine that this will play out in a good way. About the death spiral of the Internet, I had this idea as well: a less attractive Internet does attract less people and make it even less attractive as a result. The same dynamic seems to play out now in the cultural realm: less attractive venues attract less people and make them even less attractive; and there is the factor of rising prices in cafés and restaurants, for example. This will presumably one of the triggers of cultural changes. I’m already seeing these things happen in my own environment during the last few years.
@Carlos M.
The other day you had replied to me with a well written account of how you are not in touch with your own religious traditions in the philippines – you also mentioned the ecclestiastical song of “silent night”. I happen to have been baptized in the church where this song was first sung.
I am not in touch with my own religious roots either. The few times in these years in visited catholic church service it seemed all hollowed out to me, like an empty shell.
Well catholicism is something mostly dying out in Austria. Also socially, the political-catholic part of my schoolmates were rather arrogant snobs, I did not do well with them, but then I wasn’t a very social teenager anyways.
I take it the abolishion of the tridentine rite in 1963 did its thing to make catholic practice a rather empty thing.
Maybe the gospel churches of the USA an the many free churches in the Philippines are a different thing, but I would not know.
You also mentioned you visited Vienna once. I wonder how you found that city?
I had a philippino classmate in primary school whom I was friends with, and he left some kind of impression of the Philippines with me. In 2010, I spent one and a half months in the country side of the Philippines in Tigaon, Camarines Sur, doing sort of a private agricultural internship that passed as a legitimate mandatory internship in my agricultural university programme.
The Philippines were somewhat the feeling that I had memorized solely from knowing the philippine child in my primary school.
Somewhat of a SE asian-spanish mixed culture, not with such a deep and literate history like Thailand or other SE asian countries.
I remember how the “simple” people enjoyed singing karaoke over all and all in all had a very cheerful, childlike way about them, despite all obvious problems you would find.
It was also my only visit to the tropical climate zone. The huge trees and plants were marvellous, but nature was also hostile and deadly too, more so than in Austria.
I remember coming back to Vienna, feeling a strong feeling of depression here. Everything felt sterile, devoid of all the cheerfulness and bustling life.
I visited upper Austria then, where autumn starts early already in September as opposed to the warmer eastern Austrian lowlands. I looked at a hazelnut on its tree and thought “well, nature isn’t as freely giving here…”
Of course, nature is beautiful in its many forms, wherever it is. But that left an impression on me.
regards, Curt
Since I was fired from my job a month ago, I am actually very relieved. I am also not in a dire financial situation or otherwise – hard times haven’t yet come. A fellow ecosophian has told me that several of his acquaintances have been fired, seems to be a general trend now.
They say “they are looking everywhere for personell” and we wonder, why? Is it because they don’t pay enough, because intensive training isn’t affordable anymore for the industry and levels of education and skill have overall declined in the populace?
It’s true they are looking a lot for people in IT. Well I’ve applied again, yet I hop I get the state grant for care for my grandmother, something that up to now is legally possible for unemployed people. You get payed some. And then there is the pension of my grandmother.
I’d rather take care of her – though she is remarkably robust despite dementia at the ripe age of 97, it is already difficult. She lives alone, one neighbour luckily takes care of her since my father has reached an agreement.
Caring for my grandmother might benefit me too – despite the obvious, having a little more time together, I could intensify my spiritual practices there, and she lives in a suburb with forests nearby, and many ways to enjoy quietude away from this city shrouded in darkness of the soul.
Like hungry ghosts we westerners are, the vietnamese buddhist monk Thith Na Than once said.
I don’t feel like I am in a hurry returning to an office job really.
Since im am unemployed, I have continued visiting the Kung Fu training I paid for one year in advance. In Winter, my health couold not take it, because:
I always ate with my office colleagues, and the food was of a horrible quality. besides that meat seems on a subsidy in Austria, prices for fresh vitamin rich stuff have soared, so I had a lack of vitamins and minerals. I visited my grandmother during the week which was already some effort, carrying clothes to and fro, and then caring for my own household.
My training was often until 8:30 pm, after which I was in front of the problem of what to eat without lengthy cooking. Also, that training is HARD, and my body has these weeks needed to adapt to it.
When my health failed, I prioritized cooking at home in the evening and doing my magical practices, which healed me again. Also I prioritized spending more time with my grandmother, and that was some effort and still is.
Why do I go into such arduous sports training? Well, I used to be highly myopic before I had eye surgery, and before learning that such high levels of myopia in society are NOT natural. Well I suspected so already, but all the progress idiots around me said otherwise, until I gave in and lost hope.
When I was myopic, I was kicked in the head and beaten unconscious by a youth gang when I was 20 years old. Years of fear and anxiety followed, until I did kick boxing (despite my myopia) and defended myself from two junkies in a park trying to mug me (despite my myopia).
Since then, I have always need to be strong, and defensible.
I sometimes wonder – unfortunately it took long until I learned about magic in its various forms. I could have bitterly needed it in my twenties.
I wonder, what if I spent not so much time exercising physically but getting much deeper into magic and mediation. After all, mastering the mind is the highest discipline and somewhat the highest motivation across incarnations.
It is nice to be strong and fast, but it actually does not make me happy. I am unhappy, despressed and full of scorn and hatred.
I tend to step into the trap of narcissist people and their behaviour. Despite being social enough, I am in my mid thirties without any social venues, being alone. Going out to bars is as tepid, useless and depressing as I though it would be at that age.
Yesterday an ex-work colleague invited me to a performance of some computer-enthusiast artists. It was actually original and funny enough, and people were friendly, so all nice. Stout believers of progress of course.
But, I don’t get much out of that these days.
Mind work, visualization and meditation have sometimes successfully relieved me of the burden of this material and in many ways pointless and sullen existence.
Sometimes I see the light, and all the useless worldly matters are far away from me.
There’s only so much time to spend, even in a life like mine with relatively benign conditions in terms of having time.
>Whitness as an impersonal evil
It’s not really all whites, it’s just Flyover whites that are evil. Those pickup truck driving, tobacco chewing, country music listening ones. The ones that sport Snap-On stickers. The declasse whites. Which are bad bad bad. The good whites who live in the big cities, drive the upscale SUVs/CUVs, sport college stickers they graduated from, listen to NPR, they’re not evil at all. They are good good good.
Know The Difference(tm).
SLC Punk’s opening scene really illustrates the cracks that were beginning to form in Murican society all those decades ago, where the blue haired punks were fighting with the pickup truck driving rednecks. And the vector hasn’t really changed that much, just the magnitude of it.
I am currently reading a book called something like “the nice one is bitten by the dogs” (den netten beißen die Hunde), a reference to the proverb “the last one is bitten by the dogs”- usually meaning if you wait for to long to do your part and reap your gain, you will fall victim to the tides.
The content of this book by coach Martin Wehrle is how people who are generally well meaning, but also insecure, fall prey to narcissits and careerists of all kinds in these times.
He quotes studies on how people on average have become more narcisstic and competitive in the past decades, and he has done several youtube videos on narcissism and how to spot it, counter it and overall avoid it.
I twitch a lot reading that book because on several occasions, I find myself in it. Also an interesting point: nice people attract other well meaning people (I can attest to that), but as described, also unwanted attention of modern degenerates trying to gain an advantage on someone else’s cost.
The author says he doesn’t like how things are going either, but apparently there’S no other way than to adapt and find counter strategies, if we don’t want our lives in jeopardy.
In my Kung Fu training that for one or another reason I have booked and continued since a few weeks, the chinese training master likes me, and some of the nice people like me, but a fraction of the young people there hate me and always give me toxic looks.
Mind you, they aren’t much better at this training than I am, generally dull modern people with no sense for energetics and subtle current whatsover, but however that is, I have no choice but to expect their venomous presence when I go to some of the courses.
And it finally makes me wonder – due to my socially difficult past, I always want to kill people who don’t like me, thus eliminate a threat. I am always wishing for harmony.
But maybe it is the task in this incarnation of mine, to learn to deal with adversity, to live knowing there will always be people who do not like me and don’t wish me well.
I can finish this recount with an anectode: I was in Bulgaria (around 2012), at a central square of Sofia. It was an especially harsh winter, and there was an old woman on the square handing out black tea for free.
She spoke german proficiently, and said: “Well you know, people here are generally nice, not like in Austria where you come from, I mean uh, sorry, but….” I said it was alright – after all, she spoke the truth. I had learned that in Bulgaria – despite all the usual problems, one thing is true – no people don’t treat each other the same way everywhere, like here in the neoliberal West.
Another anecdote: I was at an all Austrian Ninjutsu martial arts seminar once, with parties from all 9 provinces (OK it was 4 provinces for what it’S worth).
What immedeatly met the eye – the Viennese (not my club though) were narcisstic full of themselves idiots (despite being not very capable), the yugoslavian guy from Linz Upper Austria thought he was smarter than he was, the hosting Salzburg crew, also not very capably and very posingly martial, though already of a better character.
The Tyrolean (from the mountains) crew however, had some very vital, friendly and positive characters, and it was extremely noticeable how they were much more humble, cordial and fair than the others.
Why? The dark witch(Wicca) boss of my crew said “of course they are – they have a strict hierarchy – and by abiding this hierarchy, there is no need for constant posing, competing and backstabbing!”
I think that may be something – are people in the West in many cities just like chickens that cannot find a pecking order, thus are constantly competing, pecking, unnerving.
It may be so.
I agree, JMG. Gestalt could survive 100 years or more time, if it’s known and practised by ordinary people, outside elitist circles of professionals…That’s not guarantied.
——————————————————————————–
I have a last question this week for you and kommentariat; We agree in general that we are going ahead now into the Long Descent (aka. the end of Western industrial culture). At the same time, in the last decades we can see that gay and lesbian “and so on” people rights has been more respected, at least over the laws paper. Even “too” respected for some people, I mean the Woke activism (new moralist orthodoxy?) and its critics.
I am afraid there could be a “rebound effect” and this theoretical effect could be made bigger by the future conditions of the Long Descent (general worsening of technology, politics, economy, complex social networks and so on).
Maybe we can see first signs of this hypothetical tendence for instance, in my country there’s a right wing political party, some of its members have requested the removal of rainbow flags in public places, this year Pride Day…
Do you think Long Descent times are equal to more homophobic times, or is it a deceptive fear?
@Mark L: while I like the sound of scenario 2, I don’t think either of those is really likely. Someone else has already mentioned unfettered immigration preventing a decrease in demand. There are other complications, though. I don’t know how important each of them will be, or how they’ll interact, but:
1) Inflation. The value of housing will decline, but the numbers-on-paper value will remain the same or even go up, thanks to a collapsing currency. Wages are the last thing to go up in inflation, and food is probably the first– so we’re looking at a situation where actual housing value may be going down, but regular non-investment-class people’s incomes are being hollowed out by rising prices of… absolutely everything else. Food, energy, transport, rent… It doesn’t do us much good if housing values fall, as long as we can’t save up enough for a downpayment and also eat.
2) Maintenance: we’re already looking at a pretty huge shortage of skilled workers who can build/repair/renovate houses. My area *looks* like it has plenty of affordable housing already, but it’s a sad illusion. When we go look at the houses in question, we find they are all in such awful condition that they’d either be more economical to tear down and replace, or they need work so extensive that it effectively raises the price of the house to a level no regular working person could afford– investors only. If, on the off-chance, you *could* scrape together the funding to repair one of these, via HSA loans and stuff, you run the risk of not being able to find contractors and workmen to do the work in the required amount of time. They’re all booked out to eternity. So a lot of the “available” housing is sitting empty, slowly rotting because nobody can maintain the roof. The supply may actually be declining on this account.
Larkrise, the only thing that has ever worked for me is to meticulously track the calories in everything I consume and ensure that I don’t pass a given daily threshold.
Augusto, you might be interested in Eric Jay Dolin’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire, a fascinating and eminently readable history of the North American fur trade.
Hi John,
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/mearsheimer-warns-darkness-ahead-where-ukraine-war-headed
Do you agree with this analysis of where thing are going in the Russia/Ukraine war?
Also, have you seen the riots in France. Is this an early sign of a coming era of mass unrest in Western Europe?
Thank
FI
The New York Times has coined a new term for those who like RFK jr. or who do not buy in to the official government narrative on Covid, or pretty much anything else.
” The Coalition of the Distrustful”
Well sign me up
Roger that on the housing. I’ve enjoyed reading the further comments of Mark L (I’m hopeful for scenario #2 as well) and Hakcenschmidts thoughts on the situation as well. (My wife and I have been reading Terkel’s Hard Times -a great history book, and will hopefully at least help my mind prepare for these changes, in addition to more material preps. I remember talking with my grandparents talking about the depression, but our kids didn’t have those same kind of conversations with their great-grandparents…). This is where the Long Memory of books is helpful…
On another note: Doing the MOE bridge of love, just after completing GSF Initiate SOP, got me thinking of the similiarities between drawing up the energy from Malkuth to Tiphareth, and down from Kether to Tiphareth, and brining up Telluric current and down Solar current into Solar plexus. Is this something you think can be mixed for healing, or should I be keeping these separate?
Just in the past week have built up to that stage of the Bridge of Love.
Good Morning, JMG
I am working my way through The Occult Philosophy Workbook and I am currently on Lesson 4 about the seven planes and our bodies on these planes. I think I have something of a grasp of the material body(I have one that I am learning to listen to) and the astral body(I am pretty good at visualizing things and do it a lot when I am working on a creative project), but I seem to be almost blank about the etheric body. One of my meditations produced the idea that points of contact between a material body and an etheric body would be acupuncture points or chakras. Also that the etheric body might provide energy to animate the material body as well as enliven the astral body’s imaginative and dream activities. Am I on the right track here?
Thanks much.
In regards to the housing bubble I would like to offer another hypothesis. I’m not necessarily endorsing this but want to throw it out there because it is possible and not talked about.
Here is the basic hypothesis: Housing prices have been removed from the old idea that housing prices follow wage growth. (REAL wage growth, which has been falling! Yet house prices are generally steady still.) They have been financialized. Which means that they are based on debt, on the whole, just like the national debt. We have reached “peak debt” and we, whether we like it or not, the “debt bubble” must unwind somehow. This can happen in only two ways. 1. Default. (Which would lead to deflation and dropping house prices.) Or 2. Inflation and higher interest rates. (Which would devalue the underlying debt, of all kinds.) But would not necessarily lower home prices.
I think there is already plenty of evidence that inflation has already reduced the debt load in real terms. What seems to be happening is a slow motion debt default by reducing the real value of all debt. I’m guessing the fed will continue this policy. They get the bubble still and a slow default that doesn’t bite too hard.
Like I said, I don’t know which way this will go in the long term, but the short term seems set with higher rates and higher inflation. With the fed playing the Goldilocks game of not too much inflation and not too little inflation but just the “right amount”. Of course the right amount at this point must be higher than the traditional 2%.
Hope this makes sense?
I don’t remember if it was here or on the Covid page that the idea of “The Holocaust Story” as a cultural narrative was explored.
Brian Mowrey – my go-to source for following the *actual* science of covid and the vaccines without the biases of either entrenched tribe – is writing a series on this now that I am finding very helpful and elucidating. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/transed-and-nationless-the-post-hitler
Well the Good People have themselves in a pickle.
Beside mentioning climate change ad infinitum, they do focus on LGBT folks and Blacks.
However, in Montgomery Ct, MD, a very progressive place, they have a bit of a problem. You cannot opt out of LGBT books if they are a part of any class that is not Health (and Sexuality). So they have been having blow back from Muslim parents and Ethiopian Orthodox parents. These people have organized and have tried to get into to school board meetings, who have locked them out. So what is a Good Person to do between LGBT folks and People of Color?
Reparations for Black people in California has hit a road block. The Asian and Hispanic people object to the reparations. So what is a Good Person to do between Black and other People of Color?
The Supreme Court struck down Harvard’s affirmative action policy for admissions. The Good People are screaming “WHAT ABOUT THE BLACK PEOPLE?!” The person who brought the suit again Harvard is an Asian American who represented other folks being discriminated against for being Asian. The Good People have decided to yell loudly so that the rest of us do not hear about Mr. Yang and his suit against Harvard.
As for climate change, well I will have a different post for that.
Climate change – I have noticed an obsession with electric cars. Somehow, if everyone had them, then our problems would go away. I have also noticed that the local Neo-Pagans are also obsessed with climate change, but seem reluctant to do anything except rail about it and do curses at those nasty Republicans.
Why the fetish with electric cars? It seems to be a mania that has consumed many minds starting with Biden on down. How do they benefit from electric cars?
Mary Bennet:
find Wolf’s remarks to be a shocking misrepresentation, at the very least, of what we do know about Mediterranean pantheons. What you did not repeat, but what she stated in her earlier essay that was discussed here, was something to the effect that the Greeks got their gods from the Canaanites, taking it on herself to rewrite Herodotus. That assertion is simply not true.
—
Me: I did not know that about the assertions about Greeks and the Canaanites. However, it would now seem that both Wolf and Cahn make that assumption.
Just tidbits –
about housing market – the bottom fell out in 2008. Everyone panicked since they were using their houses as piggy banks. I think that as the population over 50 grows, there will be wide-spread panic again. Now, the trend is selling the home to pay for adult retirement homes. What has been happening is that places like Goodwill will NOT take pianos. There are simply too many pianos that people are trying to give away. Auction houses have the same problem – too many pianos and home entertainment centers. That gives people a glimpse of what coming next.
About animals talking. I talk to squirrels and they talk back. I have been an animal communicator before my brain injury. I discovered that for me, animals think in pictures – usually abstract. But they get their point across. What do squirrels have to say? Depends on the species. Grey squirrels rant on about stepping away from Their Tree. Very territorial. Fox squirrels not so much but they are upset if a human barges in when they are digging for food. Then we get into the esoteric stuff, which well gets really, really weird. Like Squirrel Gods.
@the-eu-OT
Reading widely from autobiographies and blogs by autistic people helped me to keep a very open mind about the diversity of potential causes underlying any particular poor behaviour or therapy challenges. It’s very easy for experts to fail to see what is actually going on with an autistic person. Even if the autistic person can speak, often what they communicate is dismissed if it’s inconvenient or doesn’t fit with the expert’s preconceptions. Often completely inappropriate therapies are imposed that can not deal with the actual issues or that don’t really help the autistic person meet their own goals.
For example, there is Ido Kadar here: https://idoinautismland.blogspot.com/. Most of his issues, as far as I can tell, boil down to extreme dysregulation between his conscious mind and his motor control. Almost like some sort of ambulatory ‘locked in syndrome’. It is very instructive to read about his frustrations in dealing with therapists using baby talk to try and teach him things he already understood very well and which were absolutely useless in helping him deal with his motor control issues and improving his conscious control over his unconscious impulses.
Other common problems are therapists and teachers trying to push through symptoms of overload or processing delays rather than taking as long as necessary to address the causes first. It just doesn’t work. In my experience, nearly all poor behaviour by an autistic child is a result of or exacerbated by their autism in some way. To the extent that you suspect it is deliberate boundary pushing then that is dealt with by setting very clear boundaries and then making sure that your strategies to deal with the more likely causes (poor social skills, poor communication, need for more or less sensory stimulation etc) are delivered very consistently and in a really boring way so there is never any payoff to poor behaviour.
I think mostly it just comes down to trying to be as observant as possible, involve the child as a partner in their therapy rather than being the object, be flexible and minimise ego so if something isn’t working try something else, accept that all behaviour is communicating something and always ask ‘what if I’m wrong’.
Hi JMG,
A big silver lining of the eventual crashing value of real estate might be that it’ll free up a lot of spaces for other creative uses. Where we live had a quite thriving music and art scene with lots of small venues and spaces that were used as such, along with small galleries. None of this stuff was particularly profitable so far as I could tell, but people were willing to do some creative wealth destruction that benefited a great number of people. Do you think that is likely, or am I being too optimistic here?
In local garden news I am trying to push beyond the cherry tomatoes into larger ones (jet stars) – I played around with this before, but now I’ve planted only these, and am just supplementing with the cherry tomatoes that are coming up on their own from last year. I’ve been replanting the suckers from these jet stars and they seem to be taking – I’ll let you know how this experiment goes.
I managed to find some marginal space along our front porch that barely got any sunlight, but seem to be great for lettuces, so we’ve been eating that, and collards and cabbage from our garden (although we’ve had peas too and are starting to get beans). I moved to canvas planters along the side of our house (where we get the most sun, but previous owners thoughtfully paved completely with concrete). These are quite a bit deeper than the pots I’ve used here, and cost much less. I moved my pots along the fence with our neighbour, so generally have much more space to work with and am having success with some plants that have evaded me (eggplant – which are doing great compared to numerous former failures, and cabbage).
Additionally I’ve got more or less my final structures in place (bamboo stakes and twine) for growing. This year I tried to make my own stakes out of our bamboo using zip ties to join three of our thin pieces into one more substantial stake. If they succeed (ie they don’t collapse), I will look to see if there is a non plastic alternative for this, but for now this seemed like a worthwhile use of a bit of it, and I’m using the extra bamboo to build framing that makes the whole thing more solid – twine is a bit loose for this, although maybe I can work on my knot game.
I am trying to grow far more beans than I have had in the past and got them in early. I believe based on last year I’ll be able to get the area above our front path and side cement walkway completely covered with a canopy in a couple months. I had a lot of success with this last year, utilizing a space that was basically useless to me this way, and so am being much more aggressive, and building more elaborate frames to support it all, connecting them all to each other and hopefully providing enough strength. We’ll see!
We’ve been getting a lot of rain here (our weather sounds similar to yours!), so things are growing well, but I haven’t been seeing a lot of bees at the moment. I’d seen them earlier in the year, enjoying the flowers off some bolted kale that made it through the winter, so hopefully they return when our trumpet vine flowers, as they usually love that thing.
A bit of a long ramble, but in other words, bracing for impact over here! I still expect the trends at work across the globe to hit pretty hard back here (beyond the current inflation – although obviously not needing to buy as many vegetables helps with), I just don’t know quite how bad it’ll get or when…
Thanks,
Johnny
Celli, RE: Update on Cell Salts
Yes, there is an update. And sorry, I ended up coming travelling for a bit and couldn’t follow up on it as I should. I found suppliers for all the cell salts, some national some from China. Then found out we could save a little money by ordering less of each as some suppliers ship less than a pound.
Right now I am in Rhode Island and will be travelling to Tennessee for a residency of a week or so though so I am unable to receive or send packages, as soon as I get back I’ll send an update on final costs and shipping arrangements.
I didn’t receive many replies on what would be the preferred way of getting salts so I will be sending 1gr of each to all, labeled as nutritional supplements, except for those that mentioned that wanted more to share with others. So far, I think I can do for about $15-20 per person but need to get the accountant hat on and check how much was total for all salts, labeling and packaging material.
Updates will come from the same thread from gustella.adrienne@gmail.com
And if anybody else would like to receive a set of cell salts raw materials as described by JMG on his essay Home Compounding of Cell Salts to make a lifetime supply of bioplasma and cell salts, shoot me an email to the address above and I’ll add you to the list.
Responding to Clay Dennis (#197):
”The Coalition of the Distrustful”
Well sign me up
And me as well!
I would gladly wear the label “Coalition of the (rightfully) Distrustful”, over the pro-establishment, pro-ruling-class “Coalition of the Ignorant and Gullible”, which is what the lemmings and NPCs actually are.
Not to mention being “Concidence Theorists”.
#175 It is easier than you might think, because all that is needed is to keep the same ways of thinking but invert the value judgements. See this video: When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything
There are quite a few right-wing ideologues around that started out as Trotskyist revolutionary socialists at one point, e.g. the British journalist and author Peter Hitchens.
@Orion #200
With regard to my two scenarios (mass transfer of real estate to the wealthy, or a return to more widespread ownership) I don’t actually see that much difference between a situation where currency values are steady or deflating and we see a 75+% drop in housing prices, and one in which we have 400+% inflation over a decade or so while housing prices remain “steady”. The net effect is the same: a major decrease in the cost/value of housing relative to the cost/value of everything else.
As someone with a home loan and about 60% equity, I would obviously prefer the inflationary route. Debt reduction by inflation will be less disruptive than debt reduction by default; either way creditors will lose and unpayable debt will be effectively written off.
As you’ve said, you have ‘Aspergers’ (as do I) — one whose frequent characteristics is difficulty with socialization. Obviously you’ve managed very well. I’m wondering how you’ve managed your rather successful career and spiritual travels with that quality. (It being both a help and hindrance in various ways.)
Merle Langlois says:
#178 June 30, 2023 at 12:28 am
You characterize Uranus as if it were consistently evil (malefic) in its effects, though even the malefic planets (Mars, Saturn) cannot be said to act in that way, and neither can Neptune or Uranus.
Uranus is one of the “transpersonal” planets, meaning that, like Chthulhu or Zeus or any of the Big Guys (even quite often the Abrahamic god), it doesn’t particularly care about you or your concerns. At all. It does what it does. It is often characterized as “The Disruptor” or “The Change Bringer.” The changes it brings are from a larger perspective, neutral. They, however, often wreak havoc on your personal domain. In the larger sphere, they are like a volcanic eruption in that the initial effect may be devastating but following that it can bring fertility and (sometimes, as with an island) new land.
I have a lot of intimate experience with Uranus in my chart, and all I can say is, it teaches adaptation to a high degree. Be light on your feet, mentally and physically. You can’t hold on to what you want to hold onto by grasping it more strongly. It’s like the monkey puzzle bottle. When the monkey reaches into it, easily, to grasp, say, a peanut, if it tries to grip the peanut it can’t get its hand or the peanut back out of the bottle. It has to mostly let go of the peanut in order to gain the prize: it take art rather than brute force. Believe me, I’ve lost that battle enough in my own life to be able to speak on the topic with authority. The old is passing, the new is coming in on the breeze. Good luck!
@CodeSmith: #177
Yes, I’ve read all of the Magical Knowledge books and worked with material from the first two. I also made my way through a chunk of the apprentice section of McCarthy’s Quariea course. I still have it in mind to finish at some point. It may not be for everyone (no magical system is of course – & that’s a good thing).
I really like McCarthy’s writing style and her approach to magic. However, when I started I wasn’t the most stable. Though some of the work did bring me to an equilibrium, but I stopped all magical work for several years while I quit drinking (which had been an emotional crutch) and cleaned up some things in my life that needed better attention.
The one thing I didn’t quit was prayer & meditation, that got me through, and eventually the occult work could not be ignored any longer. I got back into it with baby steps… first doing the New Thought Order of Essenes work, then adding in the Sphere of Protection (Quareia also works with a seven-fold type basic ritual: four quarters, above, below, within), and then did the Golden Section Fellowship, the first part of the Order of Spirtual Alchemy and now added in the Modern Order of Essenes. All these practices seem to be more compatible with my life at this time in a way that some of the demands of the Quareia course were not.
If you have the time, space, & commitment to put into the ritual & visionary work she prescribes I think it is good. For a time she also had a mailing list I was on, and I really got on well with the people I met on there, not unlike this forum. (She replaced it with a private facebook group IIRC -and since I don’t do facebook, I’m not on there.) I can’t speak to what it is like now though.
That said, though I am not as in touch with her and those people as much as I was, I am totally amicable with Josephine and have still corresponded with her on occassion and I’ve donated some funds to their 21st century magic school because it is a project I support.
I think her book on Exorcism is top notch, and the only one I know of that approaches the subject from outside a Christian viewpoint, though still within the Western Mystery Tradition viewpoint. Also her book on earth centered magic, The Magic of the North Gate is fantastic, as is her book Magical Healing. Any of these, and her Magical Knowledge trilogy would offer a lot to people who don’t go through the Quareia course I believe.
The first book given to me on magic at age sixteen was a druid book, and I’ve always had a fondness for the druid revival. I guess now all these years later, I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe the groves of druidry may be major spiritual home, even as I still make room to explore the fruits off other trees. And maybe the Quareia course will be one of those fruits at a later time in my life.
@JMG
Just a few points about the alternative energy options –
1) Thorium has been thoroughly researched in India, more than any other country. Yet, it has not been successfully realized. From what I’ve heard, the Indian nuclear program has tried multiple different technologies, but it cannot be commercialized even at the level of conventional uranium nuclear power plants. So the thorium option is out…
2) Regarding zero point energy machines, I recall reading an interesting paper by the American physicist Hal Puthoff where he proved by way of mathematical proof, that it is theoretically possible to extract energy from the zero point energy field without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. While I’m personally skeptical as to whether his proof is correct or not, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is indeed theoretically possible to extract said energy, and that at least a few of the zero point energy machines floating around on the internet are real. Even then, they are no substitute for fossil fuels; they deliver a tiny fraction of the cheap concentrated flood of energy that fossil fuels provide. So, if such machines indeed can be made, I can imagine a possibility where such machines would power bicycle-making workshops, bakeries, and other small-scale manufacturing units; but to say that they can enable us to build semiconductor fabs or mega steel plants a couple of millennia from now is just nonsense. So the zero point energy option is out too…
3) This brings me to my last option – ‘cold fusion’, which is actually called LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) or CANR (Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions). From what I’ve seen, some very interesting research has been done on this, some of it by Indian nuclear research laboratories. Sadly, scientific orthodoxy refuses to recognize the phenomenon as valid; that said, cold fusion can again power small-scale and low-tech manufacturing units in a fossil fuel-free future, but not the scale and complexity of modern-day medium to large manufacturing plants. So LENR is out too…
I think one of the major reasons why people find it hard to wrap their heads around the fact that a technology needs to be economically viable in order to be used effectively is the fact that they don’t really understand how scaling works. It is all too commonly assumed that if it takes X units of resources to produce Y units of product in the lab, all we have to do to make 1000000Y units of product is to throw 1000000X units of resources at it, and the problem is solved! The harsh reality, however, is the fact that scaling in the real world is always nonlinear, and so you’re going to need much, much more than 1000000X units of resources to make your process economically viable; hence, most technologies never make it past the lab stage.
One last question: is the concept of the Philosopher’s Stone in alchemy purely an occult concept, or is it related to LENR? Given that LENR can transmute metals (albeit in trace amounts), could it be the origin of the ‘transmutation of metals’ theory found in all alchemical traditions?
@neptunesdolphins #203
“Why the fetish with electric cars? It seems to be a mania that has consumed many minds starting with Biden on down. How do they benefit from electric cars?”
My take on this is that it’s a visceral, feeling-level phenomenon that gets rationalized with all manner of highfalutin language.
Electricity is “modern” and “clean”. It powers the digital infrastructure that is the last bastion of Progress. It travels on such small wires that it is impossible to fathom the quantities of energy that are moving to power cities: the immense volumes of water, square miles of wind/solar, and (still the majority) millions of tons of coal and natural gas that are required to generate that electricity.
Gas stoves (and water heaters and dryers) and gas stations are the last remaining situations in which everyday liberal urbanites must confront the smelly and messy reality of fossil fuels, must acknowledge that their lifestyles are still dependent on these “primitive” compounds which have been marked as evil and outdated in the climate change discourse. Conversion to electric allows for a degree of abstraction, externalization, of separation. One can “know” that ~80% of electricity still comes from fossil fuels while still feeling good about plugging in a car to charge, never visiting a gas station, accepting that all of those electrons are just there for the buying or – if pressed – painting a mental picture of wind turbines and solar farms and hydroelectric dams that conveniently ignores the big smokestacks which are only needed to make electricity for *other* people.
Larkrise, My parents’ generation used to say, “Always stop when you feel you could eat just a little bit more.” I try to follow that advice.
I also remind myself that you’re supposed to feel hungry before mealtimes. I’m pretty sure our stone age ancestors used to feel hungry while hunting and gathering. Our bodies are probably adapted to intermittent hunger. Keep yourself busy and don’t obsess about the hunger pangs and they go away.
gregismay, as JMG points out, the “seething quantum vacuum” is the lowest point on the energy curve, like a garbage dump is the lowest point on the food curve. You can no more extract energy from the vacuum than food from a garbage dump. The amount of energy is unimportant; it is the difference or flow of energy that is useful. You can’t harvest energy from the massive amounts of water in the ocean unless you can find a point below sea level and let the ocean flow into it.
Curt, I feel for you. At the age of 25 I was smashed over the head with a whisky bottle and kicked half to death by a gang of youths. I was up in Scotland for Hogmanay. In those days Bruce Lee was all the rage and I was learning karate. I still remember limping into the dojo with my head full of stitches and telling Sensei Suzuki I was too injured to continue training. “Why no use karate?” he asked. “I was too drunk,” I had to admit. (The whisky bottle I was hit with was snatched out of my own pocket.)
Since then I’ve been mugged four times; most recently a couple of months ago. These muggers know their job. They stalk you then strike quickly before you realize what’s happening. Forget about fighting back unless you are very well trained. I don’t know about Europe, but here you will get knifed if you resist.
Incidentally I’ve been to the Tyrol, both skiing and in summer. It’s a beautiful part of the world and i had a great time there. Good beer too.
@Justin Moore,
Regarding Josephine McCarthy’s writings, I read them many years ago, but after reading her “vision” of how Tibetan sand mandalas work which doesn’t correspond in the slightest with their actual use, I threw away all the books by her which I owned. I don’t mean to offend you or others who find value in her work, but I find that they are based to a large extent on her own “unverified personal gnosis” rather than any tradition.
Brendhelm, nicely summarized.
Celadon, it won’t happen instantly. What you can expect is a gradual drying out, with the high plains near the Rockies desertifying first. That said, there’s a case to be made for relocating to areas that can count on water; anywhere east of the Mississippi should be fine.
Siliconguy, it’s always worked for me.
Ibn Zaryab, exactly. Now that they’ve embraced the delusion that the color of your skin is more important than the content of your character, all that’s left is for them to get angry at people of color for not living up to white liberal fantasies, and decide that their own skin color is superior.
CodeSmith, I’ll have to leave this to the commentariat, as I haven’t read McCarthy’s work. I’m delighted to see that she’s made her material publicly accessible in this way — as we stumble further down the slope of the Long Descent and fewer people have money to spare for occult books and courses, open source projects like this will be of immense value in keeping the tradition alive.
Merle, once Uranus leaves his fall in Taurus he will become less uniformly destructive — Taurian stasis plus Uranian disruptive energy is a great source of disastrous explosions, as we’ve seen. Expect radical changes in communication and transport modalities — it’s quite possible, for example, that the internet as we know it will break apart, and not because it’s replaced by something newer and shinier, and economic globalism is clearly not long for this world due to rising barriers between competing power blocs (reflecting the duality of Gemini). New literary and creative movements are very likely. Things will change very fast in many ways for a while, since Gemini’s so fond of speed and new experiences, but some of these will be positive ways. One way or another, it should be interesting to watch.
Travis, that’s why the established churches stomped the Gnostics, and why Gnosticism has so often attracted people who aren’t satisfied with being told to believe instead of seeking to know.
J.L.Mc12, interesting. Well, we’ll see if it catches on.
Booklover, some governments will prop up the internet, but you know as well as I do that the price for that will be increasing government control over content, making the internet increasingly boring. Other governments will let it shrink to a luxury used by businesses and the well-to-do; still others may ban it, due to the way it’s been exploited to stage color revolutions. Meanwhile the cost of maintaining the fantastically high rates of energy and resource use demanded by the internet will become increasingly hard to meet. It’s going to be a long ragged unraveling…
Curt, I think you’ve just answered your own question. A lot of people aren’t in a hurry to go back to the miserable experience that employment has become!
Chuaquin, the risk of blowback against sexual minorities is very high, I’m sorry to say. That will vary from place to place, though, as it always has.
Forecastingintelligence, Mearsheimer is generally good but he’s missing the signals Russia is sending. Putin and several influential members of his inner circle have said that since Ukraine abandoned the post-Soviet treaty of mutual recognition between Ukraine and Russia, Russia no longer recognizes Ukraine’s legitimacy as an independent nation. They’ve also talked about the historical borders of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union as the natural borders of Russia. That tells me that they plan on conquering and absorbing all of Ukraine, right up to the Polish and Hungarian borders. The risk of a resistance movement there seems overinflated to me; if Russia continues as it’s going, by the time the Ukrainian army collapses, every adult who wants to fight the Russians will be dead, wounded, on their way to a POW camp, or in headlong flight across the western border. That won’t happen any time soon, but the Russians are in no hurry; Putin knows that by the time this war has continued for three or four more years, Europe will be an economic basket case and the US may not be much better. He’s clearly interested in watching that happen.
As for the French riots, I think we’ve just taken a significant step closer to the Islamic Republic of France. But we’ll see.
Hello Mr. Greer,
I wanted to run a couple things by you.
First, I see you have had several comments telling you about Messianic Rabbi Jonathan Cahn. He is a perfectly fine figure to interact with but it should be noted he is something of the Evangelical equivalent of a pop psychologist. A lot of lay people read him but many others disdain him because the masses read him. If you want someone who is less sensational but also willing to give polytheism a critical look from an overtly conservative Christian perspective check out Michael Heiser. His work avoids the apocalyptic overtones and he is a trained scholar, so his work is much more detailed but dense.
Anyway, onto a question. Lately the cultural élite have been floating really ambitious ideas. I heard talk of the U.N. requiring mandatory digital I.D. cards attached to bank accounts, the E.U. reengineering the atmosphere, universal vaccine passports, and the like. I doubt these complex technologies can work in the long term as I am sure you do. However, do you think we might see these programs enacting within the next several years to couple decades while the internet still has enough mojo to make them plausible? If they do it could have dire consequences when said systems fail.
JMG – my double apology – I just posted this accidentally on last week’s post, got an error, and submitted it again before realizing I wasn’t on the open post. Sorry for giving you extra work to assess what in the world was going on! With your permission, I’d like to try again and hopefully get it right.
Jeff (and anyone else following the thread on military history and future), I was recently given a copy of Asa Sonjasdotter’s “Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Refiguring Practice” from which I learned of the practice in Sweden in the 1600s which labeled everything collected in cowsheds as “krono regale” (“property belonging solely to the Crown”). Sonjasdotter writes: “Special staff travelled to farms around the country and collected the urine-saturated soil, from which satpetre [sic], a core ingredient in gunpowder, was boiled… It came to cause irreversible damage to the ecosystems’ natural flows… Over centuries, farm fields and surrounding grasslands became depleted. In the 1800s, this led to a collapse of the ecosystem and to social revolt.
I wouldn’t bet on widespread adoption of permaculture (et al.) to prevent such mining in the future – animals are integral to ecosystem health and wherever they’re to be found, if humans want war that involves gunpowder, they may just re-invent Sweden’s ecosystem crash of the 1800s – especially in this transition era where we’re still likely to have feedlots and other such animal factories. Perhaps pastoral practices – great for dispersing animal contributions – might prevent their accumulation enough to thwart centralized collection apparatuses like governments and warbands.
***
methylethyl reminded me:
re: the popularized notion of forests being one big chatty group of mycelial-linked species sharing resources – I listened to a fascinating podcast the other day that featured a mycelial-network researcher (https://yourforestpodcast.com/episode-1/2023/3/13/135-reconsidering-the-wood-wide-web-with-justine-karst) who talked about how this notion has been blown completely out of proportion. The episode covers how this theory is based on two field studies. Karst and her colleagues went back through all the literature on mycelial networks and forest dynamics (thousands and thousands of studies) and found that the claims are just not supported (not that networking isn’t happening, just that there’s not enough data to claim that).
The podcast went on to cover the topic of how Science (TM) is easily coopted by all-too-human desires for certain outcomes, and how “scientists,” in their push to make novel discoveries, often make assumptions, cherry-pick data, and round out narratives. If this sounds relevant to a certain current event, it was particularly revealing to hear the guest and host hit that topic and the host end up being completely unable to accept that the same thing happens in “medical” research: at about the 1 hour mark he went from “nodding along” with Karst’s point that we’re not engaging in careful, accurate science, to “yeah, people really do need to listen to the experts!” Karst was a bit meek there, but later she did try to reiterate that it’s the so-called-experts who are promoting theories that further approved ideologies.
Sad that forests aren’t the big happy family focused on sharing and redistributing resources and sounding the alarm about threats — but that our society has glommed onto that notion so fervently makes a worthwhile statement about our own cognitive dissonance and what we want vs. what we say we want.
About the French riots, Aurelien has a number of comments in today’s link-fest at NakedCapitalism that I found quite illuminating. He lives there.
I am not sure what is the proper etiquette for pointing out this information for folks who are asking. I apologize if I did it in an incorrect manner.
@Alvin #218 (& by extension CodeSmith): I’m not offended at all. Your mileage (and anyone elses) may of course, vary. As a gnostic, I’m not taken aback by her own gnosis. When working with her system I had quite a few unverifiable visions of my own. Yet the effects of quite a few of those were very real.
Her approach packs a punch, and in this regard may be thought of as similar in its way to Dion Fortunes approach with fewer but more intense workings. That makes sense, as she worked with SIL or SOL (whatever it is these days) in the past, and of course did a lot of work with R.J. Stewart when they were partners. I like some of Stewart’s writings as well, and when I did the work in his Underworld Initiation book, it was quite transformative.
I’ve come to see the approach I’m taking now with the GSF et al as being like a homeopathic remedy, more frequent less intense, but still capable of effecting vast change.
Personally, I have no idea how sand mandalas work. I did see some for a few years in a row be made and then unassembled when some monks visited the library. I’ve never felt much attraction towards Buddhism so have never pursued learning much about it beyond the basics. She has some critical views on the Dali Lama and the way reincarnating into the same position as head of that branch of the religion is corrupting it, so she isn’t without controversy. But then, none of the teachers I’ve had who’ve been worth their salt haven’t been controversial about something. And I’ve never agreed with any of them about everything.
With regards to personal gnosis, I think at best we work with visions we have on the astral, and follow up with them on the outer and see if research backs it up. On the other hand, changing conditions on the astral and inner planes may very well open up whole new avenues of research that may not be able to be verified just yet. A body of knowledge could come from the inner that has yet to be concretized on the material plane. I think that is how magicians end up innovating on exisiting traditions.
I wish you Alvin, and CodeSmith success in your work, on whatever branch of the forking paths you happen to be on or take up.
“Why the fetish with electric cars? It seems to be a mania that has consumed many minds starting with Biden on down. How do they benefit from electric cars?”
Let me tune my tinfoil hat properly, here we go.
If you are an evil control junky electric cars are great. They have short range and take a long time to refuel. If you use a high speed charger (where high speed means 40 minutes) the charger has to talk to the car to determine how fast the car can accept charge. So now the charger knows what car is there, and the System knows who owns the car, so They know where you are. If They want you They have plenty of time collect you.
They also know your maximum range, so even if you get away They have narrowed the search area considerably. You also can’t extend the range of your car. There is no EV equivalent for a portable gas can.
So, for a gas car you can refuel in five minutes and pay cash, no trace of where you are. You can extend your cars range with a couple of gas cans. If you are determined you can park out of camera range, carry a gas can to the station, pay cash for the gas, and refuel out of sight of the evil overlord.
If you want to recharge your EV off house current you can avoid surveillance, but you will need a co-conspirator, and you will be there for a long time.
PS, “Last year, the Biden administration drafted a 2,700 page infrastructure bill with a total budget of approximately $1 trillion. While it is unreasonable to expect the average American citizen to read through every page of Biden’s infrastructure bill, some lawmakers have taken the time to do so. What they discovered was that this bill includes a measure that mandates automakers to install vehicle backdoor kill switches in every car by 2026.”
https://www.palermolawgroup.com/blog/vehicle-kill-switch-law
If you have ON-Star in your car GM can already turn your car off remotely. This “feature” will be law in the future. Annoy the All-Glorious State and you won’t be going anywhere.
PPS, Nigel Farage got kicked out of his bank, and at the moment he is effectively an unperson.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/life-uk-becoming-completely-unlivable-brexiteer-farage-being-systemically-un-banked
Larkrise, I have a couple of thoughts you might want to consider. For the sake of exposition, I will assume that you are employed in a fairly well paid field in which personal appearance is important. First, if you have access to healthcare, use it. Schedule an appointment for a complete physical examination in order to determine if there is a medical reason for sudden weight gain. Explain your concerns and request referral to a nutritionist. If finding clothes that fit is becoming a problem, find a good sewist/alterations person. Ask around among people at your professional level for referrals. If you are yourself a sewist, there now are online services which will draft patterns to your dimensions. Or, get a master pattern from online and take it to the sewist for your professional clothing. About exercise, can you connect with a walking/hiking/cycling club? If a gym membership is affordable, ask the trainer about low impact routines for persons in your age group.
Curt, cold comfort, I know, but the young sociopaths with the toxic looks likely don’t hate you. I would guess they don’t care about you at all, one way or the other. I think you, as a pleasant, inoffensive person are a target on which they can practice their getting ahead tactics. If I were running that place, I would find a way to expel such persons–lack of cooperative attitude or something of the sort. IDK, but I don’t think the point of martial arts training is to make someone a better shark.
Larkrise,
there are a lot of dietary/exercise options to choose from. Many work for some people, so not one-size-fits-all, obviously. [In other words, explore!]. In general, too, we eat badly in this modern culture and accumulate issues (whether weight or toxins or disease-tendency) incrementally until suddenly we notice it. [in other words, it’ll take time]
I found that I didn’t mind being a slightly heavier weight after menopause but whether or not that could be construed as “natural” weight gain is questionable – the fact was, I was uncomfortable with the fat around my middle. I figured if I felt like I was at my baseline normal 3 years ago but not today, then it took me about 3 years to get here and I’d be ok if I just as slowly returned to baseline.
It’s likely that what happened was that my eating habits didn’t adjust to my physical changes. Hormones [for men and women] are responsible for So. Much. including the feeling of hunger, the body’s metabolism, and how it distributes reserves. Given that menopause is (first and foremost) a hormonal change, I decided to work from there.
There’s been research done on diabetes (an endocrine (hormonal) disruption) and the utility of lengthening the fasting period to lengthen the amount of time the body is not having to deal with insulin.
“Intermittent fasting” has become another fad, I suppose, but you might look at Jason Fung’s books to decide for yourself if the practice would be worth trying. I’ve lost weight very slowly but very consistently since December and am no longer hindered by a spare tire. I’m still soft and squishy, but also strong from miles of swimming each week. I postpone “breakfast” until I reach my “eating window” after which, I can eat whatever I want (what I want is not junk food, so no harm in eating what I want) and whenever I want. I suppose there’s calorie reduction in there, but I still consume whole milk, cream, cheese, fats, carbs, etc., so calorie reduction is not my goal – hormonal stabilization and matching quality and amount of food with what my body actually wants has been my goal. Sometimes I chuck the fasting and eat early. Also, I don’t weigh myself that frequently (twice a month max).
@JMG
What’s your take on the tree model in linguistics? More specifically, do you think that the Proto-Indo-European language, as reconstructed by modern linguists, actually existed? If the tree model is wrong, it means that the evolution of Indo-European languages is a lot more complex than was previously assumed.
As for the French riots: I happen to experience them first hand, here in my small suburban town 12 km east of Paris. The library and a bank a few hundred yards from my home have been torched last night and the night before, and a shopping mall was looted. That’s just in my neighborhood, which is majority Black and Arab. In the rest of the town, seven police cars, which were parked outside of city hall, have been torched, too, plus busses, etc. Today there’s no bus service after 9 pm in all the country. The riots happen in major towns but even small towns are impacted. Big shopping malls are looted even in full daylight.
All this was triggered by what may be our George Floyd event: a 17 year old boy of Arabic descent who drove a Mercedes car without a driving licence was killed by police while trying to force his way through a police roadblock, in a town west of Paris. The boy had already done so several times before, but he had never been sentenced to anything. The patrolman who shot him dead is now sitting in jail while the investigation is going on.
I think that we’re having the beginning of a French version of the American summer of 2020, with riots, lootings, etc.
What will come out of this I don’t know. The EU is entering an economic recession and a future of energy scarcity, and eventually (several years from now, I think) food scarcity. I don’t habitually watch TV (my wife and son do), but I noticed these days that Ukraine has disappeared from our TV screen.
I have no idea how long the present turmoil will last, nor what will come out of it.
Wow, I step away for a day and lots of folks chime in on deindustrial warfare – thanks very much for your thoughts! Specific replies below. JMG, I apologize for the long comment, but I thought that would be less of a headache for you than nearly a dozen separate comments.
@JMG #48 re: Grierson’s Raid – Thanks very much for the recommendation!
@stephen h pearson #52 re: Machine Gun Ammo Tolerances – You’re getting right at the heart of what I’m wondering about. Machine Guns were developed right as the industrial revolution was going into overdrive, and every element of them was shaped under industrial assumptions – you can mass produce parts, ammo, and so forth out of metal to high tolerances thanks to lots of energy. I’m trying to wrap my head around whether or not less energy intensive methods or production will be able to produce a weapon that can spit out walls of metal that make the use of cavalry in direct combat suicidal the way industrial machine guns did. Field artillery with grapeshot may render the point moot, though, as some folks have pointed out up thread.
@stephen h pearson #55 re: Killer Angels – Thanks for the recommendation! It’s been on my shelf for years, I ought to get it into the rotation soon.
@Jonathan #60 re: War Nerd’s Post on Grierson – Thanks for the link! It turns out I read that post years ago and had totally forgotten about it. I enjoyed coming back to it (and to War Nerd, whom I haven’t read in about as long).
@Pat #69 re: Hand Crank Autofire – That does sound like fun! I’ve heard that you can pretty easily modify Marlin .22 tube-fed semi-automatics to fire off the whole magazine on a single trigger pull, but I haven’t tried it out myself. Hand-cranked rapid fire weapons definitely count for what I’m thinking of as “machine guns,” though retrofitting industrially-produced weapons assumes the availability of industrially-produced ammo (or reloads of it), which will likely become less-and-less available. Currently, I’m most interested in thinking about what things look like once the deindustrial age has “settled in” a bit, rather than the immediate future, just because that’s what’s fired my imagination of late.
@DaveOTN #78 re: ACW Cavalry and Logistics – On the cavalry, thanks for this, it helps me get a little more granular than my starting point of “Horses had a role other than moving supplies and messengers before WWI, and did not after.” As for the logistics question, of course – as the old saying goes “Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics.” I was zeroing in on what seemed to be one of the decisive changes in battlefield tactics over the course of industrialization to try to start getting a feel for what de-industrial battlefields would look like, while mentally setting aside the strategic and logistical questions for another time, in part because I suspect they will look far more like historical examples than the battlefield stuff might, but I haven’t really started thinking about it in earnest yet, so I could be wrong!
@Cicada Grove #79 re: De-Industrial Military Technologies and Wargaming – On bullets and powder as limiting factors, that’s exactly what I’m trying to wrap my head around, since as I mentioned in an above reply to stephen h pearson, machine guns as we know them were developed when they could take as given industrial production of powder and ammo. We know firearms can be produced in non-industrial ways, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has ever tried to make machine guns on non-industrial assumptions, because they haven’t had to. If it turns out that there’s no such thing as non-industrially “mass” produced ammo, then “machine guns” or any sort are unlikely to be a significant military factor. Certainly the kind of machine guns we have today won’t be workable, but I’m curious if there would be some clever workaround using natural energy inputs.
On aircraft, JMG beat me to it on the military problems with dirigibles, though I reckon they might fill a role for commerce and/or logistics. I’ve read somewhere that they’re ridiculously efficient in terms of the weight they can transport compared to planes, they’re just extremely vulnerable and harder to steer and land accurately. Your comments about gliders got me thinking about gliderborne infantry in WWII (a small and lesser-remembered part of the airborne action in Normandy). These gliders were towed behind planes and then released, which would obviously not work de-industrially, but as you said, maybe they could be towed by something to get lift and then deployed over short distances to strike behind enemy lines or the like. Worth speculating on, anyway.
And for wargaming, yeah, what you’ve described is pretty close to what classic kriegspiel looks like, which I have not had the pleasure of giving a try, in part because doing it “right” is an all-day affair for even fairly small battles. A wonderful game that gets much of what’s good about kriegspiel while making it far easier to play faster, with smaller groups, and without a game master is Pub Battles: https://www.commandpostgames.com/product-category/pub-battles/ The short version is that units are wooden blocks with a sticker for a label. Until observed by enemy units, the blocks are turned so that your opponent can’t see the sticker, and after observation, they can. For further fog-of-war simulation, you can keep the units hidden behind a card screen with a command on it, and then you move the HQ of the command around on the map until observed, and then deploy the units hidden behind the screen onto the map.
@dobbs #111 re: Pneumatic Guns and Bows with Magazines – I don’t know enough about compressed air technology to know how workable it is without an industrial base, and as I said in an above reply, my imagination is currently more captured by farther-future scenarios than closer transitional ones, but that’s a good point. I just wonder how much range and power you could get out of compressed air, even if viable. Nail gun and paintball marker yes, but long range deadly weapon? I have no idea if anyone’s done it.
On bows with magazines, that might very well be a viable option. Crossbows overtook bows in some times/places due to a similar ease of training to later guns, and as I understand it, crossbows with magazines were an important part of Chinese military technology for a very long time, so you might be onto something there. I had been operating under the assumption that guns were plenty viable in pre-industrial times, and so are likely to remain viable in post-industrial times unless the dark ages go very badly, and we totally forget they even existed.
@Martin Back #118 re: Future War and Machine Guns – Thank you for the pointer both to the Boer War and to the discussion of the MG-42 (which has near mythic status in most of the WWII military history I’ve read). If I remember right, the M240 is the FN MAG, with maybe some minor variations requested by the US military. It’s a hell of a gun, but I’m glad I only ever had to carry one to and from the MRAPs and not jump with one or on any marches! The pig is not so-called for her lightness.
@Orion #131 re: Cryptonomicon’s Vickers passage – I love that bit! Perfect Stephensonian educational digression with just enough hyperbole to keep it wryly funny. His later books may be more tightly written plot-wise, but sometimes I miss those long, meandering deep dives that his early-to-mid career stuff has so much of. It strikes me that the Baroque Cycle has a lot of good material on early modern warfare, which might be a relevant comparison for deindustrial warfare.
@J.L.Mc12 #185 re: Bow Magazines – Wow, fascinating! I guess that answers my question for dobbs on whether that would be viable with non-industrial technology. Still, I assume guns won’t be going away, but I could be wrong there.
@Chris in Fernglade: “there’s always more of them.” I can’t help but feel I resemble that remark. Is that bad? No…no, I remember, it’s not how many you have, it’s how big they are. No, wait. how you use them. Gosh, what a weird thing to say (forgive me).
JMG,
What you’ve described in your response to Boolover sounds an awful lot like the the last 15 years or so for the internet. Which, of course, suggests to me that this dynamic is not “coming soon” but already here, and governments are already frantically trying to prop up the internet at immense social and economic cost….
Neptune’s Dolphins @ 204, that kind of outrageous assertionating throw spaghetti at the wall, say whatever because the rubes don’t know anything anyway is the principle reason why I have accused Wolf of entryism.
Mr. Greer,
I know you anticipate the US west of the Mississippi to turn into desert, but I am wondering about the timeline. I live in the Midwest right now, but I am considering moving back to southern California or southern Arizona for family reasons. I am 42. What could I expect to happen within the next 4 decades? Would I fare better next to the Colorado river, like near Yuma, Arizona?
By the way, I know that I am solely responsible for my own decisions… I might have to go “into a burning house” regardless…
Thank you!
Johnny #207, I enjoyed very much reading about your garden, especially your beans! Are these beans you will be drying for cooking over the winter? I just wanted to add that you are correct, cotton twine is quite loosely spun. If you want to replace your plastic with a natural fiber, you might try cotton rug warp. It’s very strong. I’m a weaver and have woven lots of rugs and use leftover rug warp for many, many things. It’s better than string! Linen is even stronger, but costs more. I use size 8/4 rug warp, which means it’s 4 ply and 800 yards per 1/2 pound tube.the 4 ply means it’s 4 threads twisted together to form the yarn. My mom (may she Rest In Peace) was an OR nurse. She used to bring home used plastic IV tubing from work to tie up her tomatoes. Hey, it worked! Anyway, thanks for the description of your garden.
@temporaryreality: thanks for the podcast link. Yes, I’ve read some of the more breathless writing about the “wood wide web” and it did strike me as a bit starry-eyed and short on evidence, so big grain of salt and all that. That said, I tend to attribute personalities to different species of trees, and chat with them now and then– can’t imagine that they *don’t* chat with each other– so the only thing that bothers me about that is claiming Science(!) while saying it.
@temporaryreality #221 re: Royal Swedish Urine (couldn’t resist that as the subject!)
Huh, I did not know about that, and that’s very interesting. I knew that gunpowder was produced pre-industrially, obviously, but I didn’t really know where saltpeter came from, and that it would be a direct competitor for “fertilizer” (used here in its broadest sense). That’s certainly something worth considering for speculating about the deindustrial future!
>If you are an evil control junky electric cars are great.
You forgot all the gratuitous computer control and constant phoning home of all the electronics in the electric car. Tesla was caught spying on everything with all their cameras not too long ago. Smartphone on wheels.
@larkrise
Something I don’t think anyone else has suggested yet – see a good homeopath. Homeopathy is kinda hokey but you might be surprised at the results.
Jeff et al,
On machine guns, as has been pointed out, I think the limited amounts of gun powder available will be the main reason for the abandonment of machine guns.
Also cavalry is pretty useless against an entrenched position, except to keep it cut off from resupply while it is being attacked. The success of cavalry pre ACW and Crimea, was because infantry would fight in the open in formation. It was even of limited use in the American revolution because of terrain and forest cover. I think the last hurrah for a cavalry charge was Villa’s defeat by Obregon at Celaya in the Mexican revolution, though machine guns were involved.
A successful use of cavalry, actually mounted engineers, was my father leading a mounted patrol hundreds of miles behind the red lines as part of the British Expeditionary Force to Archangel and the Dvina river during the western intervention on the side of the czarists in Russia in 1920. We will leave the question of the morality of this intervention aside for the moment. Parallels could be drawn to the current NATO aggression against Russia. The success of the patrol was greatly facilitated by the fact that there weren’t actually any front lines. just scattered armies roaming around, and it was the perfect method to gather intelligence.
Stephen
Clay, oh, man, are they going to regret coining that label. Most of the people I know would embrace that with enthusiasm; I certainly would.
Justin, once you finish learning the MOE material, experiment with it. I don’t know that it’s ever been tried.
Kay, very much on the right track!
Orion, yes, it makes sense. Now we’ll just have to see what happens.
Mark L, fascinating. I’ve bookmarked it for future reading.
Neptunesdolphins, it’s seemed to me for a long time that the Good People have another think coming about their encouragement of immigration. I get the impression that they believed that people of color from abroad would respond to being brought to the US by falling in line whenever the Good People told them what to do — an attitude that’s hard to discuss without using words like “racist.” Now the Good People are discovering to their shock that immigrants have their own cultures and opinions, thank you very much. I suspect a very sharp change in attitudes on the left toward immigration may follow.
As for electric cars, it’s quite simple. Given the limits of the grid and the very high price of electric cars, the reason the Good People fetishize them is that the Good People dream of the day when they’ll get to drive and the poor will not.
Johnny, I think that’s very likely indeed. Depending on just how steeply the population contracts, there may be space available for anyone willing to move in and keep it maintained — which will open the door to all sorts of creative projects.
William, what makes my career a success for me is that nearly all the important parts of it are done in solitude. I need a lot of solitary time, and that’s what writers need to produce their work. I’ve never had much of a social life; these days, as my spiritual work has been going through a very intense phase, I have even less than usual. I had to travel to events and do the public thing quite a bit for a while, mostly while I was Grand Archdruid of AODA, but it was never pleasant and I’m very happy that I was able to set that aside. A hint: when publishers and booksellers say you have to do a lot of public appearances and readings to have a writing career, they’re lying to you. Those help them, not you. You can do at least as well by posting interesting essays on a website and engaging with your readers on the forums thereof.
Rajat, thanks for this. That’s an intriguing point about zero point energy; I haven’t seen any good evidence that it works, but I could see various ways of extracting a trickle of energy from the void. As for cold fusion aka LENR, I’ve suspected since the news first came out that that’s part of the secret behind the alchemy of metals: if the “secret fire” of the alchemists is electricity, produced by simple metal-acid batteries, it’s quite possible that some kind of reaction of that kind was involved.
Stephen, thanks for this; I’ll look into Heiser. As for the grand plans being floated by the clueless rich these days, to judge by the execution of most recent big projects these days, they will be about as successful as the grand Ukrainian counteroffensive has been…
Temporaryreality, nah, don’t worry about it.
Jessica, thanks for this.
Viduraawakened, I’m waiting for someone to finally get around to applying cladistics to the history of language. It’s painfully obvious that the tree model isn’t applicable to languages, because a language can have many parents from unrelated families; imagine what biological lineages would be like if every living thing could mate with every other living thing and bear successful offspring! I’m pretty sure, in particular, that the Proto-Indo-European language will vanish away like phlogiston as soon as a proper cladistic analysis is applied to languages.
Horzabky, many thanks for the data points. Stay safe!
Anonymous, that has occurred to me as well.
Ray, I don’t know. Nobody knows.
Coalition of the Distrustful 🙂 I want to make a COD joke about that, but I suspect most people aren’t even familiar with cash-on-delivery anymore.
Darkest Yorkshire,
Well, I like happy endings…but I don’t think I could do the once-a-day thing either. I really like eating. So many delicious thing to eat, so little time, so few notches on the belt to give. And I haven’t even tried Yorkshire pudding yet.
I will say that being 20 lbs. lighter YOY feels pretty good, though. Might have something to do with being 50 in a month’s time…
Hi John Michael,
I’m unsure what you meant by a “New England winter”, but your words sounded like the kind of winter weather I experience. Cold, wet but little if any snow. In fact it hasn’t snowed here going on two years now. The weather records from your part of the world suggest that your winters can get very cold indeed. Yikes! What can I say other than I’m summer soft. 🙂
There’s a bit of an update on the crazy weather down here (the article has a decent explanation as to what is going on): Unseasonable rain continues to fall across Australia’s north, helping lower temperatures to near-record levels.
It’s raining outside right now, but compared to what is going on up north of the continent in the usually dry season, it’s a gentle light shower.
Bonkers stuff.
Cheers
Chris
JMG,
If you’re right then this would be one of THOSE moments for me. I’ve always just assumed that the PIE origin of our language group was correct, and that remnant pre-PIE languages like Welsh, Basque, and Finnish were anomalies. I think I would have had fun in linguistics if I’d known that was a thing early enough.
Still could be I suppose…
Thanks for the clarification about the etheric body sticking around, by the way.
Makes sense.
Hello JMG, I just became aware of the stunning scale of the riots in France. Basically every larger city has severe riots. I live in nearby the Netherlands and the media are almost completely silent about the riots. The fact that the perpetrators are immigrants and that sometimes white people are being attacked is not mentioned anywhere.
President Macron blames the riots on computer games and social media and introduced proposals to censor social media (never waste a good crisis). This is so idiotic that I’m stunned. In the meantime according to a poll 70% of the French population supports sending in the army. I think that if 10% of the population can create this amount of mayhem, in another decade France will resemble Afghanistan.
I know our elites are disconnected and have a sense of entitlement and a lack of wisdom. Still, I have difficulty believing that politicians and media are so stupid that they don’t see they are driving their country over the cliff real fast. What do you think is going on?
PS For people who do video, The Real Fly and the official Visegrad channel have some video’s of the complete lawlessness on his twitter account including several police stations being torched, an immigrant sniper, explosions and people just firing arms. Quite impressive for a country where ordinary citizens don’t have guns. It shows regular people don’t stand a chance. The Real Fly also showed a message from Twitter that his account is blocked in France lol https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly and https://twitter.com/visegrad24
@Ray #233
I think “everything west of the Mississippi turns to desert” is a significant overgeneralization that ignores quite a few areas that will remain quite habitable – in the Pacific Northwest, along the coast, and along rivers draining major mountain ranges – as well as a lot of areas that will become more arid but still suitable for ranching and dryland crops.
That said, I wouldn’t put my money on the Colorado River continuing to make it to Yuma as the cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and LA fight for survival – not to mention all of the desert agriculture with water rights. Add in soaring temperatures, possible rising monsoon humidity (see e.g. https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/), falling yields from local agriculture, and a population increasingly dependent on food importation for survival, and that’s not a region I would choose to move to.
Neptunesdolphins,
Have you seen this one?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned
But, we elected you, we the Good People (TM) who feel your pain, and you’re supposed to be thankful, and do what WE want you to do now.
Clay and JMG,
The “Deplorable” label didn’t exactly elicit the horrific recoil they were after either…
This one’s a lot easier. And we can draw on popular memes of the past.
I.E. Maybe we should form an Axis. By convention an Axis has to have 3 members who all agree at least loosely on a common goal, or resentment. And they have to have a secret handshake. Ours will be wicked cool.
Maybe we could call ourselves the “Axis of Not So Much Conspiratorial Wingnuts as Just Generally Distrustful Proles,” or something along those lines.
Or we could just run with the recommendation of the national paper of record, I guess.
Still probably need a wicked cool secret handshake, though.
Siliconguy (#224) “You also can’t extend the range of your car. There is no EV equivalent for a portable gas can.”
Portable gas can + portable generator
The latter will become more and more common anyway as the grid becomes less reliable.
Perhaps a step-up transformer (for quicker charging) would also be possible.
Hi @Curt (#188),
Many years ago, I lived next to a parish that did a daily Tridentine Mass. The Extraordinary Form (EF, as it’s referred to officially nowadays) of the Roman Rite is glorious and I hope and pray that it be preserved. However, I think the emptiness around modern Catholic practice is mostly tangential to the post-Vatican II reforms. The Church is thriving in Africa and other places outside the West, and they are using the Novus Ordo liturgy. Frankly I don’t necessarily think the Novus Ordo was the game-changer there either, but it certainly helps that the Ordinary Form is more flexible especially in being able to celebrate in the vernacular.
What I think happened with modern Church practice is that Christendom died probably sometime between the two world wars, maybe a little before that. While the Church has been slowly losing her political influence centuries before that, and the Papacy had lost all of its temporal power by the time the 20th century rolled around, it’s astonishing how in a span of a few decades practically all of Europe was taken over by *explicitly anti-Christian* ideologies.
The example of Spain is particularly instructive for me. Our former colonial master was one of the great Catholic empires, bequeathed us the Christian faith, and yet in the 1930’s the entire country suddenly decided it was time to start murdering priests and religious and burning down churches and convents. Franco did end up winning and “restoring” the Church; he established what was arguably the first (and so far, only?) modern Catholic Integralist state, but it went away just as quickly when he died. Right now, only 13-15% of Spaniards *who explicitly identify as religious* attend Mass weekly (i.e. the bare minimum).
Going back to the reformed Liturgy, I can really only think of a couple of instances where I attended Mass and found myself having no idea what was going on. Once, in Munich, Germany, in a modern (i.e. generic concrete box) Church (it was a building where one side was Catholic, and the other side was Lutheran); everything seemed out-of-order and appeared to be some hippie influenced 60’s/70’s leftover. The other was when I went to Japan and went to Mass at an English service meant for the expat community; the presider was a middle-aged American priest who chided the (mostly Filipino, go figure) congregation for genuflecting because we might trip up over each other and “we just had communion, you should all be genuflecting at each other instead.”
Everywhere else, things seemed a little more familiar, including in other places in Central Europe. It was kind of sad to see that very few people attend Mass, even on that Christmas morning in Vienna there were very few people who attended. I saw more people attending Mass in Prague, but none of them looked like locals – everyone was African or Asian – then again, the Czech Republic is, as far as I am aware, Europe’s most secular nation. Although a couple of weeks later on Epiphany day, I was back in Munich and stumbled into a packed Church where a Schubert Mass was being celebrated, that was a real treat!
Regarding how I found Vienna – the city was beautiful, but also quite run down. And very touristy. I suppose I can say that about pretty much every European city, Prague fits all those even better, Munich is a bit less touristy, Berlin was _ugly_ and run-down and touristy lol. But Vienna in particular seemed to have something missing in it, like the city had very little life left in it. Frankly, the whole place felt like a giant open-air museum, a collection of objects and stories from a long-past glorious era. The masses of tourist groups certainly contributed to that impression!
As for the climate, I had literally the opposite experience as you. Having spent all my life in the tropics, I visited central Europe in winter 2014. Arrived in Munich on the first week of December, and I did not see the sun for ten days straight! Did a round trip of a few other cities then returned to Munich on 26 December, accompanied by a big snowstorm. Never seen snow in my life except for a few patches in Mount Fuji before that, I was in awe. At least for the first couple of days, when the snow started melting and becoming slippery it stopped being fun, haha! Now I understand why all the Westerners in Northern climates want to retire in Spain or Miami or somewhere else sunnier!
Well, that was a lot to say. Thank you for sharing your experiences!
“after long ages, we evolve a spiritual body, and shed the etheric body — and after even more ages, we evolve a causal body and shed the astral body. That’s why the mental body is so important; it’s our first permanent body.”
JMG, if these questions are covered in something you have written, feel free to just point me at that.
First, is there a relationship between enlightenment in the Buddhist sense and the mental body and higher bodies?
Second, what do we do once we have (only) the three higher bodies? I am guessing that that is unknowable from the lower bodies that we have now, but that doesn’t stop me from being curious.
Third, this means that there exist beings who have etheric through mental bodies, beings who have astral through spiritual bodies, and beings who have mental through causal bodies. Can we interact with such beings using the bodies that we share with them? Also, if we can, then as we form a mental body, we come into contact with a new set of higher beings. When did humanity start to form mental bodies? Would that be the dawn of sapience? Do you have a sense of how far along the process of mental body formation is for humanity on average and for the leading edge? I guess from things you have written before that humanity as a whole remains, let’s say, the primary school, and beings constantly enter first grade as cute little tykes while others graduate to middle school.
By the way, I have come to suspect that Buddhist enlightenment is actually a species-wide phenomenon and that individual enlightenment as it has been known so far is just the closest approximation to that that an individual can achieve. At least an individual in a species as highly social as homo sapiens. In other words, it is something like the sky lightening before the dawn, not mid-day sun. (Take that, owl of Minerva.)
Mark in #180 continues our conversation about real estate.
Remember that the Limits to Growth talked about global population, not local. I’ve no doubt that global population is going to peak and decline than previous population scenarios from various UN bodies suggested. Almost certainly within my lifetime – I was born in the early 1970s, so will make it to the 2050s if I’m prudent and lucky.
However, local populations can still go up. Here in Australia we’ve only had economic growth for the last 20 years or so because of skilled immigration – another country paid to bring them up as children and educate them until 25-35yo, now we get the benefits of their work and tax revenue. It’s a nice trick, a way for us to continue the imperial project of transferring wealth from the Third World without all the expense and bad publicity of pith helmets.
Now, southern and eastern Asia have dropping birth rates, so they’ll eventually run out of people to send us, and want to keep more of them. But Africa continues having high birth rates, though dropping. So the last great wave of migration around the world we can foresee will be from sub-Saharan Africa. This is already happening, of course. But over time it’s going to be fewer refugee boats drowning on the way to Europe or being enslaved on the way to Dubai, and more aged care workers, nurses, doctors and engineers taking flights to London, New York – and dare I say it, Beijing and Dehli, too.
This population growth due to migration from the Third World to the First World (and the parts of the Second World that are First World) will keep things like property values high for some time.
As well, you speak of the US simply printing money. The thing is that this is worldwide. You can find lists of countries by budget deficits – and essentially every country in the world has a budget deficit some several percent of its GDP. The only exceptions are a few oil exporting countries and some island nations living off tourism. But the vast majority of the world economy is debt-burdened.
This makes it less likely that anyone will call the USA’s bluff and refuse to accept USD, bonds and so on. Once you start questioning the debt-burdened money supply, you question it for everyone.
Still, it will of course not last forever. But in speaking of the collapse of the USD or the debt system generally, I think you’re falling into the same trap we did with peak oil a decade or so back, and thinking that since things must eventually crumble, they are going to do so quite soon and quite dramatically. Peak oil, peak debt, same thinking. Yes, it is a real thing – but it’s a slower and less dramatic process than we might reasonably expect.
It’s amazing the efforts the little mouse will go to so it can keep running in the little wheel if it thinks there’s a little pellet of sugary goodness waiting for it at the end.
Mr. Greer,
Thanks for your answer… You’re right… the climate is too complicated to know for sure what will happen when. The past can only tell you so much…
I’m definitely going to avoid Las Vegas, since its economy seems based on people spending money they will not have.
Tucson, Arizona (which I know and love) seems heavily reliant on military spending and higher education, so I can see its economy contracting, but I can see it existing in some form or other. It was founded as a Spanish presidio in the late 1700s.
Don’t know much about Phoenix aside from supposedly being the site of the largest oasis of North America. There was even a civilization there that, at it’s height, had a population of 40,000. The Mormons discovered the remains, which inspired the name they gave to the city they were building there. I can’t imagine it maintaining it’s current size of 4-5 million, though, either.
I could go on, but I’m going to stop… headache…
Hi John,
I don’t know if you saw this, but right after the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action was handed down, a former Biden staffer and standard issue AWFL (Affluent White Female Liberal) by the name of Erica Marsh tweeted the following
“Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action programs were needed. Today’s decision was a TRAVESTY!!!”
This immediately drew an angry response from lots of Black people, who denounced her patronizing tone. One Black man wrote in response
The quiet part has finally been said out loud. Our white progressive saviors don’t think very highly of us.
And a Black woman whose daughter just graduated from high school as an honor student said
My BLACK child just graduated from high school with a 4.43 and 72 college credits. Thank you for letting us know that her skin color means she’s still dumb asf and can’t succeed on merit.
Sol, who is a Black man from the Deep South, wrote on his blog
We can achieve success in a merit based system. If the system is racist then we can’t. That applies to everyone. Funny enough and I’ve said it a million times. The biggest loser in this will be white women. Not blacks. Not Hispanics. Certainly not Indians or Asians. It will be white women that suffer most with this ruling.
All the so called black leaders bemoaning this are doing it for other groups. Not for blacks. They’re bemoaning the ruling for the liberal cause.
Sidenote. Don’t tell me sh*t about sh*t on this one. My boot camp photo has me and one other black guy in it. Same for all the schools. Same applies when I joined the Sheriff’s Dept. Not all will choose the same path but all can succeed. Maybe not become Steve Jobs but all can win.
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2023/06/wow-this-lady-just-insulted-entire.html
More fallout from Erica Marsh’s ill-advised tweet;
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/conservatives-calling-liberals-racist-for-implying-black-people-not-smart-enough-to-enter-universities-without-affirmative-action/ar-AA1dg1zL
JMG wrote
Neptunesdolphins, it’s seemed to me for a long time that the Good People have another think coming about their encouragement of immigration. I get the impression that they believed that people of color from abroad would respond to being brought to the US by falling in line whenever the Good People told them what to do — an attitude that’s hard to discuss without using words like “racist.” Now the Good People are discovering to their shock that immigrants have their own cultures and opinions, thank you very much. I suspect a very sharp change in attitudes on the left toward immigration may follow.
Not just in the USA either. Look at the riots going on in Ecnarf, which seem to be escalating into a full-blown uprising by angry Muslim immigrants. And as we can see from the pushback Marsh has been getting from Black people in America, there are a growing number of people of color who are fed up with the way liberal Democrats have been running things. They can see just as well as anyone else how conditions in Democrat run urban areas keep going from bad to worse in spite of all the Rescue Games and Woke rhetoric.
Chris, this is what a New England winter traditionally looks like:
This part of the US used to be legendary for its cold, snowy winters. Instead, we’re getting your kind of weather. “Bonkers” is a good description.
Grover, evolutionary biology got shaken up good and hard once cladistic analysis came in. It could be used just as effectively on linguistic history — and I suspect the reason why nobody uses it is that everyone’s afraid of the results.
Boccaccio, I know. Macron and his EU pals are trying to make believe that they’re not looking at a potential revolution in the making, because they’re stuck in a failed ideology that claims that such things don’t happen any more. Smaller crowds than this brought down Louis XVI.
Grover, I’ll pass on the Axis but I’m sure you’ll find plenty of other applicants!
Jessica, some of this is covered in my book The Occult Philosophy Workbook. Enlightenment is one of the stages of spiritual development; the sort of “sudden flash” enlightenment that so many Buddhist writings discuss is what happens when the integration of the mental sheath into a mental body happens quickly. (It can also happen gradually.) As for what happens when we complete the process is that we’ve achieved spiritual maturity and can go on to take a grownup role in the cosmos. This happens to each swarm of souls; ours — the one that includes all present animals and plants as well as us and beings who have already passed incarnation — is the fourth swarm, and there are supposed to be seven during the lifespan of the solar system. Beings in our swarm have been evolving mental sheaths, and then mental bodies, since far back in prehistory; ours is only one of many kinds of material bodies to host that transformation, and there are others (for example, dolphins) in the world right now. There are always young souls entering human lives for the first time and old souls rising above the human level; most of humanity is now, and has been in every age, passing through the stages in between.
Ray, it’s easy to get stressed out about the future. Take your time, and make sure to spend plenty of time relaxing and thinking about other things.
Platypus, I did indeed see that. It’s possible that we’ve just seen the woke movement committing seppuku right there in public.
@Justin Moore,
I agree with you that ultimately every tradition came from someone’s gnosis and was subsequently verified by others either through their own gnosis or through study and meditation.
From what I remember of McCarthy’s work though, she seems extremely opinionated based on the things that she sees in her visions. That’s her right to do as she sees fit, but I’m not a fan of her approach personally.
This piece on discursive meditation by JMG always comes to my mind when I am reminded of her work, or see the work of others who have a strong “visionary” element to their work: https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/foundations-of-magical-practice-meditation/
No offence meant and I see that you don’t depend solely on her writings anyway, I wish you the best on your path.
@JMG and Justin Patrick Moore,
Thank you both for your input, Justin Patrick Moore, that was some reply which i really found useful and well said! I like a lot of her material (I’m working through the books) now too. I don’t do Facebook either, never did, and don’t plan to start! That’s probably the one area that I find disappointing. I downloaded the entire course and the corresponding support files too. I have incorporated some small pieces of the course with the book material, and the “apprentice study guide” is very well done. She will mentor serious students if you get through the apprentice material unscathed, which is pretty cool.
She has a Wicked sense of humor which helped jog me out of a kind of stupor that I fell into by allowing a lapse in my own training.
If you can laugh at yourself, there’s Hope! ;^)
@Alvin,
Some of Josephine McCarthy’s ideas and concepts differ significantly from some of the traditional Concepts (almost radically) and Ideas I’ve practiced for a Long time too.
I don’t have an issue with someone’s UPG , If they don’t insist it’s gospel. Early on she makes a statement (in her First Book – 2nd editions all) that some people will disagree with some of her ideas and concepts, which she says she finds “healthy”. While I also
have some disagreements with some of her stuff too, at this stage of the game I’m able to to be selective in determining what’s useful to Me, discarding anything inharmonious, or sometimes modifying it just a bit to to graft it in, done that too.
Thanks for your input, I wasn’t aware of the “sand painting” discrepancy!
The CodeSmith
@Justin Patrick Moore #198,
Ever since starting the Bridge of Love, I have had the nagging feeling that there is something missing in the solarplexus area.
I‘ve experimented with shifting the energy centers a bit, so that at the very least the solarplexus is covered by a sphere (or rather, in my current version, a couple of spheres).
But it still doesn‘t feel right – as if the energies really should meet in the solarplexus rather than in the heart. On the other hand, I‘m very hesitant to „send“ out the energy from the solarplexus center, as I think there is a good reason this is done from the heart. I haven’t found a solution to that yet, though.
If you come up with any modifications, even failed ones, over time, would you mind sharing them here?
@JMG: I found it quite interesting that the original location of the energy centers in the Bridge of Love covers shoulders and hips aka the „big“ joints, which also play a strong role in some Tai Chi energy work. Would you happen to know if the Western occult traditions have anything to say about these hip and shoulder energy centers, and the role they play or effects they might have?
Thanks,
Milkyway
JMG
Austin Coppick recently did his 6 month astro forecast on Rune Soup, during which he mentioned that the upcoming Sun/Mars conjunction in mid November will ping sensitive points in the charts of Russia, Ukraine and the EU. He was rather vague as to what this might mean. What do you make of this from the perspective of your approach to mundane astrology?
Thank you for your work.
Mike
@Mark L, thanks for the link. A lot of food for thought.
As for relaxing… you’re right, Mr. Greer. I also have many months to think about this, so I am in no rush.
In The Witch of Criswell Ariel reads a book on how to be a private investigator. Did you have a particular book in mind? I have Surveillance Tradecraft and a book for journalists, Investigative Reporting, but the last time I looked I couldn’t find a comprehensive book on how to do investigations.
About the discussion of the mental sheath that you and Jessica are having: is there any relationship between the mental sheath and intuition? Or are they two separate things?
SO much wonderful advice re weight loss. Thank you. I am going to comb through the suggestions and see what fits. I just want to be comfortable in my skin; what others think when they look at me is their issue …
Last month I asked if anybody knew much about soul retrieval. I’m off to visit a shaman next month, as per a suggestion from the commentariat.
What an incredible resource this site is. Just incredible.
Thanks to all. Thanks to JMG.
With regard to the deteriorating internet situation, this little ditty emerged from my overheated brain-pan yesterday (apologies to the WOH version of the mythos):
THEM! IT! Oh! Oh!
I think you have to have read them to know just how
An information junkie gets, today
When info-morphine is cut with other stuff:
More potent things than man can bear…
Too much! Too much! The internet is now
No longer mugging-free, suffice to say.
And oh! The horror, wildness and the fluff
Do nothing but empower madness sheer…
Much like the Lovecraft stories’ baneful arc
Upends the lives of heroes, curious-caught
And lured more deeply into maelstroms fraught
With lurid loathly monsters of the dark.
Methinks to send my mind away from there
And dwell a time outdoors in climes more fair.
Regarding the electric car conversation, I’m perhaps a bit qualified as I own one. The plusses and minuses are both significant. I maintain all my own vehicles; most people who don’t do so don’t realize what a Rube Goldberg contraption a reciprocating internal combustion engine is, let alone once you add a dozen-plus gizmos to housebreak it (reduce emissions). As I approach the age of seventy, not climbing under my car twice a year to change the oil is a good thing.
Ford has estimated that they can build an electric car with 60% of the labor hours of an ICE one; that’s got to be a strong motivator.
It makes one aware of how spectacularly inefficient the average car is. My car’s fully charged battery holds the equivalent energy of two gallons of gasoline and can travel 200-250 miles on that.
It does take a long time to “refuel”, but one can mostly just plug it in when at home and not worry about it. If you can’t plug it in at home I wouldn’t recommend one for you.
The car can provide a kilowatt or so of AC power for two-plus days; I expect using it to keep the fridge running will become more useful as the long descent plods along!
The least enjoyable aspects of the car are shared with most contemporary vehicles: all the user interface whiz-bangs and the technology underpinning them. A car does NOT need Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/GPS/satellite radio!
Lastly, dissensus: I can see a world where vehicles run on whatever makes the most sense locally. Here in the eastern megalopolis electric cars make sense. In Curtis, Nebraska, not so much.
@Clay Dennis, JMG
” The Coalition of the Distrustful”
aka Erika’s
“Los Ungovernables”
JMG, Viduraawakened,
Let me share some developments in linguistics, which was my major in college. Back in 1997, Robert M.W. Dixon wrote a book called “The Rise and Fall of Languages” which proposes a model of “punctuated equilibrium”. It’s been over a decade since I read it, but I’ll try to give a summary without doing too much damage to the thesis:
The usual situation is: Languages influence, and are influenced by, their neighbors over long periods of time, and converge on some set of features. There the tree model is not insightful, and the author cites the aboriginal Australian languages as an example. On occasion, due to technological disruption etc., people migrate and spread their language quickly, and in these cases the tree model makes more sense. The classic cases are Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, and Niger-Congo (most noticeably the Bantu sub-sub…group). Now, that doesn’t mean that these groups each have a single “language” as an ancestor. Rather, the ancestor was a group of languages in some equilibrium. So, yes, there is likely no such thing as “PIE”. But there had to have been some group of languages in close contact over centuries, until such time as they spread throughout Eurasia. In Europe, such a group could very well have also included the forerunners to modern Uralic languages.
I have no idea how much attention this book was received in academia, but I’m guessing not much, since at the time the scene was very much in thrall with Chomsky and generative grammar. In any case, I found Dixon’s book convincing. Now that I think about it as I’m writing this, it’s possible that the two scenarios presented were influenced by binary thinking, but it’s certainly a step up from “only one model, one that happened to be noticed by Europeans first”. I’m also not sure if his analysis quite rises to cladistics, but it seems a realistic revision to the tree model.
Side note, in the 80s and 90s, it was still a thing to refer to Altaic languages, or even Uralic-Altaic languages. Since then, Altaic has long fallen out of favor as a category, since evidence from older manuscripts has shown that the three ostensible groups therein, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, actually diverge as you go back in time, rather than converge. So much for a tree!
-John N.
In my #68 post I felt a strange compulsion, on having read a little poem or lyric from Monte Cazazza, to post said poem. That was wed. On Friday night I got a message from one of my friends that he had passed away.
This is another instance where I have had an omen of some kind or some resonance around a person who is going to die. The Scottish call this the second sight -but I really don’t know what to do with it. Often times I don’t really know what it is until the person has died, as in this instance.
I hope to come to recognize it better, and to use it for something good. Does anyone else have experience of this and what to do with it?
I did get some tips about this once from aforementioned Josephine McCarthy when I had intimated that a co-workers mother was to die. Afterwords, on McCarthy’s advice I gave my coworker a hug and told her “let me know if you need anything” as is often said, but with magical intent. What followed after that were some interesting dreams where I did seem to help the person on the astral plane.
But when it is a minor celebrity or public figure such as Cazazza, I’m not sure what it means. He was one of the instigators of the industrial music scene, and I have a connection to that scene, so it seems to be about lineage in a way, or a passing on of a larger phase.
In any case I am curious if others have experience of this because I often find it puzzling, and I can’t do what McCarthy suggested in every situation.
Thanks to all.
@mark l — thx for that. btw — any link to your tweets? I agree with you and jmg — it is not one cause, but an interplay of potential “butterfly effects”. I’d like to see your data/sources on the flux
@ray — Tucson is great — I went to college there in the 80’s and stayed awhile. But I left in the early 90’s. The population has doubled since then. I last went to Tucson in 2018 to look at the U with my son. I did notice the city seems to be getting run down a little (the roads in the foothills especially). But it is going to be a gradual process I guess.
@jmg — saw this link about peak oil https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/hubberts-peak-is-finally-here . I am sure the people in charge will pretend all is well, but this can’t stay hidden. btw, I have not seen oilman2 post in a while — have I missed his comments or has he gone dark?
Hi John,
Thanks, would generally agree with your outlook on the war.
As every month goes by, the chances of a peace deal resides.
This is looking like a long war to the death.
At least where my in laws live in eastern Poland have a strong military. The Russians have historically got their noses blooded by the Poles so will hopefully build a iron wall rather than attempt to subject eastern Poland to the revived Russian empire.
Of course history suggests I’m an optimist.
Regarding France how do you see an Islamic republic emerge.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/6/30/mapping-french-protests-over-teen-killing
Looking at the map, the insurrection is concentrated in the big cities.
Large parts of France, particularly north west France seem unaffected.
Also the chatter I’m hearing is there is a surge in support for Le Pen right now among ordinary people.
Do you not think a hard right government could restore order, repatriate the worst troublemakers and expel the illegals in the future? Preventing the emergence of a Muslim dominated France?
Or maybe the country falls apart with parts of the centre and north becoming the stronghold of the non Muslims and the big cities around Paris and Marseilles the stronghold of the Islamists.
My post about future housing glut and pianos – I can explain the connection. I have a neighbor who moves old people into retirement homes. He tells me of how they want to stuff a house worth of furniture into a small one bedroom apartment. Reality sets in, and they decide to either sell their furniture or give it away. Problem is that no one really wants the furniture. They all want to either donate or sell their pianos. And apparently a well-appointed home in the past thirty years had a piano and a home entertainment system. Both are unwanted since they assume space that people no longer have.
I have another neighbor who delivers furniture – high-end furniture. He has noticed that few people can afford the furniture, and that the same people are ordering it i.e. very rich people. He wondered why whole areas of split-level and five bedroom homes are not on his delivery list. His assumption is that they are rich. I said no, they are people living off their federal government pensions, with their mortgages paid off. They can’t afford a rise in property taxes but want the property value to increase so they can sell at a profit. So, there is hidden poverty that people fail to see as poverty.
In other words, when housing prices crash, there will be a whirlwind of hurt. Meanwhile, a lot of elderly people (over 65) are becoming homeless because they can’t afford taxes or the second mortgage they took out. Many are pensioners relying on the government, which has failed them.
About the Good People – I watch a variety of odd TV – one being Epoch TV run by NTD, who are anti-Chinese Communist. They have a program called “California Insider” where the host who emigrated to California from Iran discusses with various people why California is failing. The show started when the host wanted to find out why people were leaving California in droves. The upshot from his guests is always the same – Sacramento doesn’t care. They are too busy implementing theories than actually finding out if those Progressive theories actually work. He has had farmers, police, mayors, doctors, a wide range of people on to tell their stories. The guests tell of the disconnect between the Good People and everyone else.
The doctor discussed how the drug policy has upended surgery since people high on drugs have problems with sedation. Since many drugs are either legal or not prosecuted, he can’t ask what they are on when he provides care for them. It has flummoxed a lot of his fellow doctors. And, his frustration is growing with all of the Progressive actions around drugs.
So, my conclusion is that the Good People are totally disconnected and deranged at the same time.
Something very troubling has just occurred to me, that I can’t quite shake. I know more than one person who was part of movements such as the Flat Earth Society, as jokes, who left because they realized people were serious about it. This has happened more recently, and one person noted the people getting involved in these movements have gone from parody to serious. Well, the deeply troubling thought I’ve had of late is that part of the Myth of Science holds that people in the past believed things which are obviously false; in order to make themselves feel more important, our intellectual class has created various myths of absurdities people used to believe. Well, what happens when the backlash against science gets really underway?
I’m starting to wonder if some of us will live to see a society where most people genuinely come to believe the Earth is flat, because of the backlash against science, and more troubling, about what other crazy beliefs we may see “revived” in such fashion.
JMG Re: forests turning into grasslands
Thanks for the additional info. The recent events have me exploring the history of the “dust bowl”. I’ve come across some people working to reclaim desert in the west that was once grassland. I’m not sure if this is really helpful or just idealism.
Another interest is in small rural towns in the Midwest that are slowly dying. I see some becoming pet projects of relatively wealthy locals. The only ones that seem to be stable have some small industry. A wire fence company, concrete mill, plastic molding, and farming.
Things change, people adapt.
@Anonymous
Would believing in a flat earth be such a terrible thing? For the vast majority of people on earth, it would make no practical difference whatever in our day-to-day lives. With long-distance air travel slowly winding down, it seems like it’ll be even less important, going forward.
It’s weird that flat-earth is the thing that repeatedly gets brought up in such discussions, as though believing such a thing would make us into barbarians, or cause civilization to grind to a halt. Would it really? Why the gut-level horror at scientifially “wrong” beliefs?
@Roldy re: electric cars
They’re a niche market, probably good for wealthy people in dense urban areas in moderate climates. Not much good anywhere else.
They are a lot heavier than regular cars, and put more wear and tear on the pavement, so to avoid the cost-offloading problem, they probably need to be taxed more heavily than standard cars. They don’t work in extreme cold– seasonably unreliable in places like Alaska, Canada, and the more northerly interior US states like the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho…
I live in a hurricane zone, and here, the sensible thing to do wrt electric cars, is ban them entirely, for anybody with a home address in a likely evacuation zone. They are a logistical nightmare when it comes to mass evacuations– we’re talking thousands of people leaving town all at once: even when they make all lanes of all the major roads outbound lanes, you can easily spend six hours driving a distance that would normally take one hour. It’s hot during hurricane season, it’s hotter on top of pavement, and people are gonna run their air conditioners, run down their batteries, and end up with very heavy disabled vehicles further gumming up traffic. There aren’t nearly enough chargers to accommodate evacs. AND for bonus points, if you *don’t* evacuate your electric car and it gets submerged in salt water from the storm surge, the batteries can corrode and spontaneously burst into flame in the weeks following the storm. Those fires are extremely difficult to put out, and the fumes produced are incredibly toxic. We had a whole rash of such fires after hurricane Ian, recently. They’re probably not the worst environmental hazard out there, but they’re pretty bad. It’s not like gas cars are ideal: gas stations tend to run out during evacs, but you can take precautions for this, keep your tank full June-November, and as long as you have enough to get to the next county, you’re usually OK.
@Anonymous #275,
A little while back, I had a discussion with somebody who seriously insisted the earth must be flat. Their main rationale was „they are lying to us about everything else, so they must be lying about this, too“, and „we question everything“.
Well, they certainly didn‘t question what some random guys told them in youtube videos… 😉
Milkyway
@Mary Bennet
Thanks for your kind reply!
Well those younger in the kung fu club, one is not a kid but ~35 (my age) the others ~25-30 are longer serving than I am and seem to form some kind of “cool kids of the school” team.
Who cares – if it is only nasty looks I get, I am careless. Also, they aren’t actually special martial artists
and relatively tame in reality, so I am also not very intimidated or anything.
But the last time I got a nasty look, I should have added another banishing ritual afterwards in the evening, which I usually do in the morning otherwise.
I am certainly also above-average sensitive in such respects, but there’s a reason they often bound the eyes of
prisoners ready to be shot – eyes can curse.
@Martin Back
Thanks for this! Yes you are right and I am aware – professional criminals cannot be matched as a civilian
in that respect i.e. I am not dreaming of Chuck Norris scenarios. A solid stance will however repel more ordinary and cowardly brats, the more ordinary bunch that all the same may look
for an opportunity to make trouble.
@Carlos M.
Thanks for this also!
Yes the winter – these years, unlike in my childhood and adolescence, there is no snow anymore in Vienna.
It’s is anyways historically a place where wine is grown and is located at the border of the temperate to mediterranean zone.
Instead, it’s raining at about 4° celsius which is also very bad, because water has its highest density at 4 degrees and is a great storage for temperature, thus covering everything in very cold.
Being soaked wet in such weather is rather evil. I once, in Sofia in Bulgaria in the same weather saw a homeless man sleeping in front of the back air ventilation of a diner, sleeping in the warm though damp and smelly air.
@ Ray – I’m wondering about the new discussion of militarism towards Mexico. I think every part of the US will face difficulties, but living near a border conflict also worries me more than a little. I worry that the pain of that may even proceed the pain of desertification and overt water struggles.
@Anonymous
“I know more than one person who was part of movements such as the Flat Earth Society, as jokes, who left because they realized people were serious about it….”
I also thought that was just a joke until I met more and more people actually believing in this and other things.
I had ugly fallout with an old hippie, because I doubted his idea of building a free energy machine.
He wanted to prove its veracity to me showing me a youtube video of I think “James Fieldings”, an electrician explaining why this idea can actually NOT work out like a perpetual motion machine.
The old hippie even put it on his facebook site, I’m not sure he understood the contents and whether his english was proficient enough to entirely understand the matter.
He said however he was sure there must be something this guy on yt has overlooked on.
I’ve read some time ago many of these ideas originate from only a few places on the internet nowadays.
Wonder if there’s a psy-op channeling popular discontent into absurd alleys.
I am not surprised though; these opinions always present themselves as an alternative to the status quo.
It’s difficult to discern right from wrong in things like scientific, industrial fields and concepts, so you could only either believe it fully – or reject ALL of its premises like done here.
There have been a few posts speculating on where America is compared to the Roman Empire so I would like to add my theory. Of course history does not duplicate itself but there are parallels.
It is now established that the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire in 27 BC. However there was no such announcement at the time. All the same institutions remained including the Senate. Just a few name changes of government positions. It is apparently in hindsight that historians decided that 27 BC is when Rome started changing from a republic to a dictatorship.
I think we are at a similar point today. The popularity and election of Trump apparently so shocked the elites that they began plotting to make sure a non-establishment candidate would never win again. The result is that democracy, free speech, free assembly, and equal justice are starting to disappear. So it appears that 2016 is our 27 BC.
“I’m starting to wonder if some of us will live to see a society where most people genuinely come to believe the Earth is flat, because of the backlash against science, and more troubling, about what other crazy beliefs we may see “revived” in such fashion.”
I doubt it, because it doesn’t require any “modern scientific expertise” to deduce that the Earth is round and that Earth and the other planets orbit around the Sun. As long as we have amateur astronomers and some manner of global travel and wizened elders on village councils and working orreries (e.g. http://www.theorreryshop.com/), I think the flat-earthers will remain a fringe minority even if their numbers do grow.
I could easily see the backlash against science resulting in a majority of people rejecting other tenets that *do* require experimental evidence and faith in the scientific method – like germ theory or evolution by natural selection or vaccination (already underway). All of those examples have room for alternative explanations or interpretations that make sense from a less-reductionist, less-rigidly-scientific worldview, and it could be argued that a rigid commitment to science (and especially to science-as-a-religion-with-a-profit-motive) has done much ore harm than good.
I will report on my week and how it affected my mood:
I was sad and depressed for a prolonged time, with bursts of anger, until Fridays when I visited a Krav Maga Training course with colleagues of my former company where I worked, that I am participating in.
There I got the uplifting vibes, the trainer and ex colleague approved of my skills, I could do intense sessions of boxing exercises. The others were the secretary and former secretary and now hr of my company section who are in their twenties, pretty and have always been kind, and an intelligent, introverted colleague with whom I trained, a guy who doesn’t seek much attention and seems also be wary of social sharks. He seems to trust me now, another thing I am happy about. So no irkhole vibes.
Also another hr woman, nice but quiet and somewhat sickly and tense, unfortunately.
So the bad vibes from that week – getting a friend mad at me because I confused an appointment, my old grand mother being sad and things being challenging, kung fu club dorks mal-eying me, and the depressed world all around – they canceled out. I am proud I have visited 4 sports evening sessions, completed lots of paperwork and daily necessity, walked two times one and a half hours up and downhill through the Vienna forest hills to visit my grandmother, and visited that IT guys cabaret with my former work colleague that was funny enough and people there kind enough.
Friday evening I met a friend and we started drinking. Then I got the glorious idea to go to my place and make use of a legal derivative of what is akin to an anaesthetic for horses. I got it many months ago, but never felt like trying it. Turned out I also unwittingly gave each of us two a dose about 4x what is considered “standard”.
Well, not long after we were voyaging out to space. Though in full clarity of thought, not like when simply drunk.
I talked to my friend about the philsophical question of the point of our material incarnation.
Then we went to rest, I went on my sofa and not soon after was lying in my own vomit, my body resting and needing time to rest, not yet ready to get up again. Again I reflected on the meaning of incarnation and the question of how to accept the evils of the world, how to accept our existence in this material realm.
After some rest I got up again, cleaned the vomit away and sat together again with my friend, both of us reflecting on our (ongoing) trip and what it meant. He was a little upset I set such an irresponsible dose, but was happy after all about the whole story anyways.
After that I went to bed again, resting though not really sleeping. I reflected on the atrocities we had talked about before of for example the mafia wars of Mexico. Visions of hell passed my inner eye. I chose to postpone a definitive answer on all that, and just accept that I have to accept it.
In the morning I got up and my friend got up, and then I headed to my next appointment wandering the forests of Vienna with another friend of mine.
He the spiritiual middle aged man once come to Vienna from Uruguay, admonished I should not conjure such dark energies when I am under the influence of a chemical agent. He told me how these mafia killers are on drugs and full of demonic energies, and talked some more about the topic.
The wandering was marvellous, and the forest wandering with friends is also what I look forward to the whole week, after good work is done.
I was at one historical building of Vienna in the forest, large with a cafe, and there are actual californian mammoth trees growing there, planted a long enough time ago.
I was in awe of the sheer beauty I saw.
Here I sit now again at home, somewhat tired. But certainly not angry, scornful and depressed like much of the week passed.
I guess continuing the good works is what is up next.
Hi John,
I think you are right that the long term Russian aim is the total conquest and occupation of Ukraine. Revelations concerning the Minsk Agreements and other acts of treachery have convinced them that the US and its European satellite states are “non-agreement capable”, as they say in Russian diplomatic circles. In addition, NATO leaders recently stated that as soon as the war is over, they plan to admit Ukraine, even though the country has not met most of the requirements. The Biden administration later tried to walk back some of those statements, saying that Ukraine still has to meet the normal conditions before they can join.
But the damage has already been done. Russian leaders are convinced that they cannot afford to leave Ukraine as an independent state, since it will otherwise not only rearm for the next round as soon as the fighting stops, but become a forward base for US and NATO forces under the protection of Article 5.
So the Russians will continue with their strategy of grinding down the Ukrainians until their military collapses, while using the war and its side effects to inflict crippling collateral damage on the other European economies. Simplicius points out in a recent blog post that the summer fighting season has around four more months to go until the rasputitsa sets in and major ground operations will have to be suspended. He reports that there are indications the Russians are gearing up for a massive wave of drone and missile attacks this fall once the rasputitsa begins, with the goal of taking down what’s left of Ukraine’s power grid and other energy infrastructure, and making sure it stays down for extended periods of time. Remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that Western governments and news agencies were claiming that “Russia is running out of missiles!”, or “Russia is running out of drones!”, claims that obviously proved to be wishful thinking, especially considering that the Russian Aerospace Force is already pummeling Ukraine with dozens of drones, missiles and glide bombs every day and shows no signs of running out.
JMG & All,
I recall reading one of the RR et AC’s (G.`. D.`. Inner Order) “Flying Rolls” (Papers circulated between members of the Inner order), named the “Vision of the Universal Mercury”. What was memorable about this act of “Scrying in the Spirit Vision”, was that it was a “shared” vision by two of the members at that time. The vision itself is memorable too for it’s content, (Hermes / Mercurius) lives up to his Mythological image, but the fact that it was “shared” by two members of the order, and which one is commenting / interpreting on what’s happening just stuck with me for a great many years.
Has anyone else shared a “conscious” experience of joint “astral projection / scrying in the spirit vision”, simultaneously with a another person? For example, traveling to, or working in, an “astral temple”, or some other construct, or other areas or levels on the “inner planes”?
Thanks
CodeSmith
@Ray, the Second #253:
I do not recommend Phoenix, based on having lived there for twelve years. It has massive suburbs; the whole city is based on cheap petroleum, cheap electricity, endless real estate growth, and endless aquifer water.
Here’s a look at The Zone, a homeless encampment in central Phoenix:
https://azfreenews.com/2023/03/a-wasteland-of-corpses-living-and-dead-a-devastating-inside-look-at-phoenixs-homeless-zone/
It’s being cleared up now, but I doubt the homeless problem will be resolved any time soon.
Also, I recommend the book “Bird on Fire” by Andrew Ross.
JMG, do you suggest the OPW’s images as topics for scrying while working through that volume? I’m not a very competent scryer at this point and would like to remedy that.
[Also, to the general commentariat, here’s something that doesn’t really matter, but that bugs me nonetheless and so I’ll issue an apology for a dumb edito in my post above. I typed “saltpetre” without its “l” and then put “[sic]” after it, making it look like the author spelled it wrong. I was trying to be clever and point out the British spelling rather than the American – though why I thought that was important is now beyond me. So, blame not the author for the misspelling – that was all me, being a busybody.]
@Larkrise
Others have already offered lots of very useful and actionable advise, so I will not repeat here. If you allow it, I’d rather offer a vision of what body type is more natural to you.
I will first point out that, even though media is pushing overly idealized versions of one or two body types above all others, there are still healthy bodies and pathologically large (or, for the matter, slim) bodies. For starters, the really big people that have difficulties moving around are definitively neither healthy nor adaptive; they would either loose weight or die in a preindustrial environment.
People with disharmonious bodies are neither healthy. By example, the “pregnant frog” body type with long, thin limbs and a wide waist are not particularly healthy either; they are not storing fat in the adipose tissue where it belongs, but around their internal organs, which may cause problems down the line.
Now, in Traditional Chinese Medicine there are 5 physiological (aka, just right in their own way) body types, one for each of the 5 elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. Metal is the athletic body type media says everybody should have, while Wood is the very thin and flexible type that some subcultures (like the Ballet or Fashion scenes) worship. Fire also falls into the low BMI side of the spectrum, but is more of a nerd-chick type.
Water is the rounder, Buddha-ish, body type. You can say it is your natural state and not just obesity because you feel happy and energetic and are physically active most of the time. This is by virtue of 1) fat being stored in the adipose tissue and 2) your body being adapted to tap into that fat storage for fuel when your glucose levels are low. These you achieve with exercise and (if you find it feasible) intermittent fasting.
My own body type is Earth: what used to be called “big bones”. It is the phenotype of the old-fashioned Strongmen, though there are of course plenty of large ladies that fall into this category as well. More slow going than Water, Earth is really strong (think of a wave vs a landslide). The basics of body composition remain, though: you need to store fat where it belongs. You know this is your natural type (indeed, I decided I have an Earth-body instead of a Metal-obese-body) because you are highly energetic, though not as cheerful or active. This energy is manifested instead in short bursts, and if you develop it you can excel in disciplines that require explosive strength. (think of competitive weight lifters or football defense tackles).
Milkyway, there are references here and there, but not many. The problem here as always is that we only have what little could be salvaged from the wreck of Renaissance magic.
Mike, I don’t use conjunctions of that sort in relation to foundation charts. My approach is the more traditional one of casting ingress charts for the solstices and equinoxes, and eclipse charts, for national capitals. Mundane astrology’s a huge field and I don’t claim to be able to judge all of it!
Yorkshire, I read half a dozen of them from the public library system here in Rhode Island while gearing up to begin the series. I’m sorry to say I can’t tell you which ones, because the local library system has put in a new online search program that works very badly — I ask for nonfiction, for example, and it gives me novels. Wasn’t it Calvin Trillin who said that “upgrade” is the most frightening word in the modern English language?
Jbucks, the term “intuition” is very vague; it can refer to almost any mode of perception that doesn’t work through the material senses. Some mental plane phenomena are experienced as intutions, but so are some astral plane phenomena and a great deal of etheric phenomena.
Clarke, thanks for this. That’s actually quite good.
John N., thanks for this. Do you know anyone, anywhere who’s discussed the possibility of applying cladistic analysis to languages?
Justin, this isn’t something with which I’ve had any experience at all, so I’ll have to leave it to the commentariat.
Jerry D, fascinating. I’ll take a look at it and see what I think. As for Oilman2, I think he’s gone dark — he’s been getting ready for this for a long time.
Forecasting, you might want to look at a map of where the violence took place early on in the French Revolution. This is standard: once you seize the major cities, especially Paris, the rest can be taken later. Mind you, it’s also quite possible that things could go the other way — anyone who can rally the army and police forces at this point could end the current republic and install a new government the way a couple of guys named Bonaparte did.
Neptunesdolphins, they’re deranged precisely because they’re disconnected. They live in their own little self-referential bubble; failing aristocracies usually do.
Anonymous, I don’t know if belief in a flat earth will be part of it, but a general rejection of scientific ideologies is very likely just now.
Piper, of course. Some places will thrive even in desert conditions.
Roman, that’s quite plausible, but I think you’re a little behind the times. Our 27 BC happened in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt turned the presidency from an administrative office to an elected dictatorship. That being the case, we’ve got a senile Nero on the imperial throne…
Platypus, exactly. The leadership of the NATO nations hasn’t even made a pretense of wanting a lasting peace; if they push Ukraine into a ceasefire, it’ll be purely for the reason they arranged the Minsk accords, to give Ukraine time to build up a new army and start the fighting again under better conditions. The Russians know this perfectly well. Their best strategy right now is to keep doing exactly what they’re doing and let NATO bankrupt itself and Ukraine bleed itself dry.
CodeSmith, good heavens, yes. See if you can find a copy of Alan Richardson’s book Dancers to the Gods, which includes the magical journals of two of Dion Fortune’s students. They routinely had shared visions in the scrying process.
Temporaryreality, you can certainly do that; it’s one of the reasons those were included.
@JMG
Just wanted to use this open post opportunity to let you know that your body of work, the immensity of which has been of Great Value to me over the years! Books such as “Circles of Power”, Paths of Wisdom, The Celtic Golden Dawn, Inside a Magical Lodge, et al, have provided “crucial pieces” to my carefully woven personal practice! That, plus a good deal of group work going back to the mid-seventies, I am fortunate to have known a lot of similarly inclined folks. Also, your other services to the “cause” such as this, and various other blogs, too! What a “Wealth of Information and Advice” you have provided, it is “Real Impressive” to say the least! I’m aware that you have intended that to be the case with a lot of your work, can’t say “Thanks” enough though!
I wish a Happy and Safe Independence Day to ALL, from a VFW Vet!
The CodeSmith
Hey John, in my free time on the weekends, I visit yard sales in my area and buy anything useful or just peruse the wares. I particularly enjoy looking through any books they’ve got for sale, sometimes there are books you can’t find anywhere else. Today I struck gold!
I found a 1978 copy of a book called Muddling Toward Frugality by Warren Johnson. Have you ever read the book before? It sounds a lot like what you’ve said. Here’s a bit from the inside cover of the book:
“after generations of extravagant and reckless industrial expansion, we are clearly entering an age of economic scarcity. While human demands continue to rise, natural resources, especially the non-renewable kind, become harder to find and more expensive to extract, process, transport and distribute.”
I would love to hear your thoughts on the book if you’ve read it before.
I was recently told that HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard were pals and wrote to each other and even “shared” a universe for their characters. And supposedly had shout outs to one another in their books. Do you know if this is true?
Would you ever consider writing a “match up” of those two characters in your universe?
@JMG (#290) to Roman:
I’ve always thought the same as you, namely, that 1932 marked the end of the USA as a republic, based on things my father told me as a boy about FDR and his presidency. He utterly despised FDR for what he had done to make the Presidency an incipient dictatorship.
When we moved into my mother’s childhood home in 1952, when I was 10, and I started rummaging through the boxes of memorabilia in the closets, I found a political badge of some sort saying, “Why Risk Dictatorship? No Third Term!” The memory of that badge has always stuck with me.
(And I suppose you know about the failed “Banker’s Plot” (so-called) to take executive power away from FDR, while still retaining him as a powerless figurehead. One of the plotters was Prescott Sheldon Bush, whose son and grandsone subsequently became the 41st and the 43rd Presidents.)
@JMG (#290) to Codesmith:
I’d like to echo strongly your recommendation of Alan Richardson’s Dancers to the Gods, and also to recommend the hard-to-find articles and books by the two “dancers” themselves, Colonel C. R. F. Seymor and Christine Hartley.
In her mundane life, BTW, Hartley worked as an editor. It was she who first brought H. P. Lovecraft to the attention of the British reading public. As an editor, she worked under the name “Christine Campbell Thompson.”
Do you have any thoughts on the possibility of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant getting blown up, whether by Ukraine or Russia? I think it’s more likely that Ukraine would be the culprit. I’m not sure how likely it is, whether Russia has any defenses in place to prevent it, and what the ramifications would be if such an attack succeeds.
@temporaryreality #288 re: Scrying
Forgive me for butting in, but I wanted to share one option for working on scrying that you may or may not find appealing or helpful. Some books on magic include what many folks call “pathworking,” though it is very different from what JMG means by pathworking in his books. These are essentially guided scrying sessions – an author presents a concept and then describes an imaginary journey/experience. My experience with this approach was using a set of them for the Elder Futhark Runes in The Teutonic Way: Magic by Kveldulf Gundarsson when I was getting started with magic the second time. I have a soft spot for them because in the middle of one of these journeys, I had an unexpected and rather strong spiritual experience that took me well off the marked path.
It has some pros and cons: the main pros are that it’s super easy and exposes you to some of the flashes of intuition and insight about symbols that scrying is meant to. The cons are that you’re bringing in someone else’s symbolic associations and intuitions and you’re not really learning the weird blend of active/receptive that “real” scrying has. I think the analogy of training wheels is pretty apt: you can work on some aspects of riding a bike, and you can get to places on that bike, but you’re not learning the core skill of balance until you take them off.
So, if you do think some training wheels might be helpful for a bit, I’d recommend this approach: read through the “journey” before sitting down to scry. Then, when you do, try not to follow it slavishly, instead, use it whenever you get to “what now?” and let yourself go off-script if you feel yourself pulled that way.
If you feel like you’re already past where this would do you any good, then my apologies, and either way, good luck!
JMG,
I’d like you to help me out in properly thinking about the fascination or obsession people seem to have with the idea that the elites are in firm control and will have even firmer control as time goes on. For example that there will be digital currencies, more lockdowns, vaccine passports, you will own nothing and be happy, and all of this other parroting of ideas that somehow “this time will be different” once again and somehow, just this one time, the elites won’t be carried out by the currents of history as they always have been. Where does this come from? Why do so many believe this and parrot it? This reminds me of my question to you years ago about “The Singularity”.
CRC
@stephen h. pearson #239 re: Cavalry
Thank you for these examples to look into! It does seem rather likely that cavalry will at least have a role to play in reconnaissance, patrols, and raids. I remember I was shocked when I learned as a teenager that the Jeep was commissioned to replace horses, and my mom was like “oh yeah, my dad used to tell us about how the Army came to the farm and requisitioned their horses for WWI.”
”The Coalition of the Distrustful”
Is there a lodge I can join? (Even if the officers are probably secretly Illuminati globalist scum 😉 )
@ Jerry D – I lived in Tucson around the 2008 financial crisis and I loved it there. At first I thought the city had underdeveloped infrastructure, but I then became of the opinion that maybe Los Angeles is just overdeveloped. For example, LA is really far too eager to cover exposed land with concrete. I have not been back to Tucson since, though.
@ Candace – I grew up in the LA inner city during the crack epidemic, and I have family now in Mexico that live in small cities controlled by cartels. So I’m no stranger to this, unfortunately.
At least some of the cartels seem to be wising up politically. For example, I have heard that they will often serve as law enforcement (if they’re not already in direct control of it or outright manning it with their own people), dealing with non-cartel crime better than the police. Recently, I even heard of a cartel NOT collecting protection money when taking over a city. I suspect that something similar would apply north of the border, if it ever came to that. Although, I would expect a lot of murders initially, just to make clear who’s the new boss.
Gangs in the inner city, though, are even worse, if relatively less powerful.
@ Cliff – Thanks for the link. I’ve seen similar in LA when visiting family over the last several years. I’ve also read Andrew Ross’ book a bit over a decade ago… I believe the subtitle is something like “the least sustainable city in America” or something like that…. So, yeah… I don’t think I will be going there. Thanks for the reminder.
Dear JMG, Sorry if someone already asked this, but did you see that Biden called Xi a dictator after Blikens trip to China where he had to suffer through 9 hrs of meetings with three leaders? It seems Biden was mad about this and rambled on about China at a fundraiser the next day. The speech was put up on the WH website, prob at Biden’s insistence , and Bliken and the St. Dept had to go along with the charge. Likely the working group agreement that might have led to a summit in Oct. is out the window. The neocons seem hell-bent on a two front war in Europe and China. I’m focused on how I can keep my 19 yo son out of them.
@Alvin #257: Thank you for the well wishes for my path. I offer the same to you also. It’s kind of strange how I’ve always been drawn to the avant-garde end of things, even since I was a kid. It makes me wonder about my past lives from a recent comment JMG made somewhere, about people coming into life with very particular predilections that don’t necessarily match the situation they were born into. That taste for that kind of thing has always been matched by the taste for more traditional modes, whether in music or magic. One day I’ll be listening to John Cage and the next Bluegrass. One day its industrial music, another day Chet Baker or 1960s rock.
So with magic, I have been involved in Thelema, and the more out there end of that scene with Oryelle Defenestrates ChaOrder of the Silver Dusk, and the Horus Maat Lodge. While they had things I was strongly drawn too, and I am happy about the work I did with them, ritually and iwth group projects, they weren’t training orders, and the development of my practical ability wasn’t furthered so much in a nuts and bolts kind of way. Josephine’s work offered what I was looking for at the time, and now I have found a better fit for myself with the Golden Section Fellowship and related groups from John’s teachings. I had been drawn to the AODA when I first started reading the Archdruid report, but I haven’t gone down that road at this time. I may, as I still feel a strong pull and home in druidry.
I do agree that it is wise to meditate x3 on scryings, and thought if I get back into doing the visionary stuff ala Quareia, that I would incorporate meditating on the material I see in the visions at least three times. I think that is a good way to balance it.
Somehow I think my tastes for these extremes, the avantgarde and the traditional can be mixed into something fruitful within my own imaginative alembic. All of the threads of the different strains of magic and groups I’ve been involved with over the years will get woven together. Now I am focused on finishing the courses I’ve started and building a more solid foundation than I had before.
@Codesmith #258: Thanks for the kind words. McCarthy’s sense of humor is indeed wicked, and definitely a draw for me to her teachings and books. Having a sense of humor about ourselves and the work I think is needed to leaven what can be so sirius at other times. Those who have no sense of humor about any of it, makes me scratch my chin a bit.
Also I appreciate that she taught a lot about places on the inner planes and very much about inner plane contacts and contacted magic that I was not getting really anywhere else. The fact that she was making it all available to the public and really pushing some more advanced things out there, I really resonate with. That doesn’t mean I don’t need to double down on building a solid foundation -and I’m really getting a lot out of the old fashioned style classic western occultism that our good host is teaching too. As I mentioned to Alvin its that pull in me between avantgarde on the one hand and tradition on the other.
@Milkyway #260:
Thanks for your input about the energy centers. Yeah, sometimes when I’ve done the Bridge of Love too, I’ve felt like the spheres of the tree should be slightly different in my body than as they are described. I will keep learning as it is written and then when I’ve gone through all the material and learned it really well I will start experimenting as John mentioned. Please post any further things you find and I will do the same. I may join the form over on the OSA website in time.
About events in France, a few thoughts occur, for what they may be worth.
First, burning of libraries is a line crossed, bringing up uncomfortable memories of Nazi book burnings, and more recent destruction of cultural monuments, such the huge Buddhas in Afghanistan and the antiquities of Palmira. I doubt this constitutes a way to secure the passive acquiescence of non-combatants. The rioters, so far, are not looking like the kind of war band which gives the people a better deal than Macron does.
I doubt American GIs would ever be deployed in Ukraine, NeoCon fever dreams to the contrary, but should the present unrest continue, it would not surprise me to see them sent to France. Lafayette, nous sommes ici. There is still a great deal of Francophile sentiment among American elites, many of whom have contributed to the rebuilding of Notre Dame. We even have an American Friends of Chartres, where you can donate to the project of window cleaning and receive a photo of “your” window in its restored glory. I also think the wealthier elements of the American right would be happy to “answer the call” and privately help their friend, Mme. LePen, with both men and money.
Hi John Michael,
I see, well that image is a remarkable difference to what your words describe. Although I’d imagine you being closer to the coast, with all that thermal mass, the oceans bring would keep your city a touch warmer during winter than that scene – maybe, although I’m only guessing.
Makes me wonder how farmers are getting along in your part of the world facing those conditions. It’s raining here again right now. Saturated soils during the winter months can present quite the challenge to not only infrastructure, but agriculture does it harder again. Oxygen in the soil gets displaced by water, and things go nasty from there. A whole different batch of soil critters get to enjoy their day in the err, swamp – and they’re not all that friendly.
You mentioned above about declining house prices and the effect on retirement. When I was a kid, the older folks retired from work, and just sort of hung around their houses until they died. I certainly don’t recall the sort of expectations of luxury this and that, and constant jetting around the planet, which seem to form part of peoples dreams these days. Hmm. Interestingly too, as a very young adult, I recall during the recession we-had-to-have, that a lot of older folks where pushed out of their homes (forcibly downsized perhaps?) due to unpaid property taxes. Like the old story, they were asset rich and cash poor – more or less meaning that their outgoings exceeded their incomings.
And I salute your approach to this budgeting matter. It’s the only strategy which consistently works. It just doesn’t include luxury this and that, and jetting around the planet. How could it?
Cheers
Chris
There’s something I’ve been wondering about for a while, on the topic of the internet being already past the point where it requires massive ongoing government subsidies to survive: it’s always struck me that in the wake of the Dot Com Bubble bursting, there was a shift in the nature of the internet: it was ever more commercialized, which isn’t surprising, but what always seemed weird to me was that there was a shift: Big Tech Companies increasingly took over, and nearly all of them turn out to have ties to government.
I wonder if the internet actually should, from economic principles, have died in 2001, after a brief experiment revealed that there was no way to successfully monetize it, and older ways of doing things were better anyway, and it’s been propped up by ever since. If this is the case, it would also help explain why so many things have been destroyed by the effects of the Internet (such as local news, theatres, brick and mortar stores, and the like), even though most people like them: these are byproducts of this process. They are being sacrificed in order to keep the Internet alive…
CodeSmith, you’re welcome and thank you.
Enjoyer, I know it well and it’s an excellent book — I wrote about it at length back when I was talking about peak oil.
Nando, good heavens, yes! They were close friends, and there was a third author who was in cahoots with both of them, Clark Ashton Smith. Smith contributed nearly as much to the Cthulhu Mythos as Lovecraft did, and Howard put in a great deal, too — the mad poet Justin Geoffrey, who has a significant role in my tentacle novels, was one of Howard’s creations, and the serpent folk (think Ss’mei, and a certain librarian) were another. I used material from all three authors constantly in my novels.
Robert, thanks for this. I wonder if it would be possible to get together a collection of Hartley’s and Seymour’s unpublished manuscripts, and go looking for permission; I know a publisher that might very well be interested.
Cliff, I have no idea. All I know is what various non-NATO and non-Russian media say about it.
CRC, if there are elites in control of the world, then the world is under human control. That’s far more comforting to many people than the alternative, which is that nobody controls the world and it’s just going to keep spinning away on some trajectory of its own, over which we have no say.
Karl, yes, I saw that. As Obama famously said, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to **** things up.”
Chris, so far the farms in New England are doing fairly well; we had ample rain over the winter, the growing season began earlier than usual, and the weather’s been moderate. A lot of other parts of the US aren’t having anything like so good a time. It’s a little less snowy than the picture in a normal Rhode Island winter, but it’s not warm; here’s a picture of the outdoor skating rink in downtown Providence, typically open all winter:
Anonymous, a case could be made.
@JMG and Mr. Nobody
Riffiing off Mr. Nobody’s #25 –
Just a guess on my part, but I doubt Biden will be replaced, at least not before the election. His handlers will prop him up and help him find his shoes, as they’ve been doing. His appearances will become less frquent, and shorter, so as not to make it more obvious that his trolly sometimes goes off the track.
There still have to be primaries and the nomination of a candidate. I don’t think Harris can win the nomination and she’d be replaced with someone else on the ticket if she did run. Her best career move is to continue making word salads and wait for the election to be over. Her best shot at being Pres. is to wait for Joe to die, resign, or be removed by the 25th Amendment. -Assuming Biden wins the election.
RFK Jr doesn’t have a snowball’s chance. The mainstrream Dems and the MSM have made sure there can be no serious challenge to Biden.
Newsom has made such a mess of CA. that independants won’t want to vote for him. I don’t think he can win the election just with the blue no matter who vote.
Biden has a proven track record of being able to beat Trump. Put anyone else in that slot and the Dems would be taking a very big chance.
It could be Trump is the only candidate who could make Biden win – again.
I could see Biden resigning after the election – not right away but a year or so after. I don’t think the 25th will actually come into play – just the threat of it should be enough.
JMG a book report for you and the commentariat. I just finished “The Delusion of Crowds” by William Bernstein. It was a most interesting look at the history of manias. He focused on just financial and religious manias starting in about 1200 AD up the the present. It was interesting to see that humans have been cycling through the same acts of delusion with similar results for a very long time. It is a well documented read with lots of references. He ended it with a discussion of ISIS as a religious mania which I found quite enlightening. It did not leave me with optimism for all the talk about it being different this time. It sure looks to me like we are cycling through the same nonsense again in terms of financial nonsense as a number of the manias of the past. One could hope that we had gotten smarter as a group but I have my doubts.
JMG,
Thanks for doing these open posts.
I recently read a short article by Charles Hugh Smith in which he talked about being “shadow banned.”
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2023/06/how-did-someone-like-me-get-shadow.html
I found the article chilling, in that big tech and gov’t seem more and more to be shaping/restricting public discourse China style.
I am wondering if you think this trend will continue and/or if you share Smith’s concern about it.
Thank you,
Edward
Tom, one of the most enduring truths of history is that nobody learns from the enduring truths of history. It’s always supposedly different this time, especially when it’s not.
Edward, this has been going on for many years. I’ve gone through periods when this blog or its predecessor was very hard to find on search engines, and those tended to be periods when my readership stats were unusually high. Anyone who strays from the approved narratives of our failing civilization can expect that kind of treatment.
Hi to everyone,
Luke Dodson, I clicked on your link to the Rolo Corbett interview, I actually didn’t finish listening as I had to do some other stuff, but it did send me down the rabbit hole that is Rolo’s blog.
Tip to everyone, give it a read, you may need to hold your nose regarding some of his personal biases, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he’s saying a lot that you aren’t going to hear on any other English language site.
May I also suggest listening to the latest Rune Soup episode with Astrologer Austin Coppock (and even the previous one too).
In both, he talks about Saturn in Neptune and what happened in Russia in the past, when this aspect occured.
The fall of the Soviet Union
Death of Stalin
Russian Revolution
Assassination of Tsar Nicholas II
Apparently we are there again, but for longer than the previous occurrences.
When he talked about it in the January half year forecast, I couldn’t see what the threat to the Russian leader(ship) could be, but in light of last weekend’s events, as well as reading Rolo’s blog describing, according to him, the absolute corruption, (much more than I had thought) within the Kremlin, I’m rethinking things.
He says a lot more besides, if you’re prepared to do a lot of reading.
Both he and Gordon, who have no connection as far as I know, talk about Russia’s warlords, (there are many) and things could possibly end up in a battle? among them.
So, if Russia is to be the seat of the next high culture – is that correct JMG? – they may have to go through some more tumult to get there.
I’ve also mentioned Armstrong a number of times, with all his cycles, including the rise of civil unrest, France, anyone? And the new centre of finance being China, by 2032. BRICS? Belt and Road? De-dollarisation?
We certainly do live in interesting 🤔 times.
Regards
Helen in Oz
Correction
I believe it is Saturn and Neptune in Pisces.
Anyway have a listen, jus search Rune Soup and you’ll find it.
Helen
Here is an interesting chart and table about resource production.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/how-big-market-crude-oil
As the mill manager used to say back at the mine, “Tons, need more tons!”
For those of you interested in climate change and global warning etc a book I have just finished might interest you. It is called “Approaching crisis of global cooling and the limits to growth”. Written by Shigenori Maruyama
@Windman,
Thank you for the question! I’m glad you’ll have a chance to see Japan. A lot of what you can see may depend on the season, and a week is quite short. It looks to me like you will be spending most of your time in Tokyo and Kyoto, and perhaps Nagoya. The major shrines in both Tokyo and Kyoto will probably have daily rites. I just checked Meiji Jingu’s website, and it appears you can request a short ceremony for a fee. https://www.meijijingu.or.jp/en/feelshinto/6.php You would need to have someone in your group who understands Japanese. They appear to have someone at reception for tourists who speaks English, and they may have advice on times and places where you can witness one of the daily ceremonies from outside.
Regarding advice for tourists, I have never actually been a tourist in Japan, so I would not be of much help. Generally speaking, the people here are very kind, there is no social unrest (and I don’t foresee that changing soon), and I have not heard of anyone having trouble here.
Read up on Japanese etiquette, especially if you are going to visit a shrine. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right. What matters most is sincerity.
I’ve noticed several people on the first day of comments (which is as far as I’ve gotten through) interested in Prigozhin’s attempted coup, so I’ll offer up what little bit of insight I have from experience. I was on a three-day trek through the mountains east of Baikal a couple decades ago, and the leader told us about an experience he’d had on a more challenging trek, in the Altays or someplace, when the leader, a quite respected guy, had a prolonged prima donna fit, the proximal cause of which was a dispute with his girlfriend. The whole group was in terror for several days until they could get back to civilization. He said it was a rare and extreme but typical result of various factors within Russian culture.
My impression is Scott Ritter has the best overview of what happened in the current case. As of April, Wagner’s contract with Russia’s government had expired, and they were essentially operating contrary to Russian law on what had officially become recognized in the meantime as Russia territory. Because Prigozhin has a lot of wealth and contacts, he also had a lot of very good publicity. What the public saw was a group of heroes halfway through their most heroic feat yet, that no one else could presumably accomplish. The authorities were split about what to do in that situation.
Machiavelli warned against using mercenaries.
I have a question for anyone in Canada, including Ron (honk!honk!). How bad are things really getting there?
I’m asking because Prof. Magda Havas at Trent University appears to have abandoned the BRAG Project for global EMF monitoring without saying anything to the volunteers. I know she herself is okay because recently she asked to be removed from a conversation involving bitter recriminations between two of her colleagues. I contacted another colleague of hers because I had data on automobile EMFs she was interested in and explained I had been unable to provide it to the BRAG Project due to problems with the platform. This colleague tried twice subsequently to contact Prof. Havas, but we got no reply.
Today, I looked at the BRAG Project website https://globalemf.net/ , and all of the data–hundreds of data points–had been removed from the map, with only one data point in Calgary remaining.
The last the volunteers heard directly from her was more than a year ago, and I stopped monitoring last December to wait until we heard what was going on.
The BRAG Project should not be a source of controversy, but then neither should attempts to preserve a vaccine control group, for example.
Are they going after dissidents now? Is it just censorship? Or perhaps it is just something going on in her life?
I have an aunt in Calgary, but she had a bad time after her vax, and it is clearly hard for her even to text a few lines in greeting. Her daughters never kept in contact with me, but she says the one who became a professor (and undoubtedly took the vax or I’d have heard about it) is not well. No word at all from another aunt on Vancouver Island.
@ Jeff Russell #298 Re: Cavalry
My father grew up on a farm and had his own horse as a child. (His sister told me that having your own horse in those days (1930s) was like owning a sports car today.) So when he signed up for WW2 he was posted to a cavalry training camp, with actual horses. Somewhere I have a picture of him in army uniform standing on the ground and pulling on the reins of his horse which looks as though it would rather be doing something else. Then, such is the way of the army, he was posted to the North African theater and spent the rest of the war in the infantry.
@ Ray 2nd #300 Re: Political gangs
Gangs are a powerful force in many of our communities here in Cape Town. Some years ago they held a march on parliament to protest against police harassment. I happened to be in town that day and was surprised to see how much support they had — there were lots of ordinary people in the march carrying placards and chanting. But they are smart enough to keep in with the local communities by spreading a bit of money and some groceries around. In return they are rewarded with tip-offs about police raids and the like. Plus of course they are totally merciless so you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them.
Regarding woke-mycology and questionable ideas about the ‘wood wide web’:
Mycology is strangely potent right now. I guess it’s partly due to the popularity of psilocybin mushrooms inspiring vast numbers of people to explore the subject.
I do wonder, however, if some symbolic meaning could be extracted from the increasing obsession with nature’s agents of decay and decomposition in a dying industrial civilization.
Hey JMG
Another book that I would recommend reading is “real men eat pufferfish” by Robert twigger. It’s essentially a how to book detailing a lot of interesting and “manly” activities that may have relevance to the long descent, such as how to buy a car in a 3rd world country with out being ripped off and techniques the KGB used to practice being intimidating, as well as more light-hearted skills such as how to do stand-up comedy or win at croquet.
He also wrote a similar book called “Micromastery” which is interesting since it is all about skills that can be practiced by themselves if you want, but can also be used to introduce you to related skills if you are interested enough. He uses omelette making as an example. You can practice making omelettes until you get good at it fairly quickly and stop there if you want, but if you develop a stronger and more general interest in cooking then you can transfer some of the skills from omelette making to cooking other dishes.
It occurred to me that a lot of basic occult practices such as the fourfold breath or discursive meditation are also Micromasteries, since you can both practice them on their own or as part of the more general curriculum of golden dawn occultism.
Cliff #297
Remember that Ukie government and part of their military are far right wing ideology, not to say durectly fascists…They have wet dreams in which they blow up taht nuclear plant and then they would balme the Evil very evil Russians…
Another question if they could do it in real world. I doubt it because Russian defences look like strong, but who knows?
If a nuclear plant is blown, Maidanist regime in Kiev would ask for help to NATO and maybe US governments would like that “opportunity window” to send airplanes to the war. However, this would lead fastly to WW3…
Mary Bennet # 303 said: ”
“First, burning of libraries is a line crossed, bringing up uncomfortable memories of Nazi book burnings”
Yeah, it’s a very nasty attack, even if you don’t like the National French Front and you understanmd the awful life conditions at the “banlieus” of big French cities (like it’s my personal case), you can see it’s barbarism. Pure barbarism. I expect this acts would have perpetrated by violent minories, not crowds of people.
Don’t idealise immigrants or foreigners descendants…
Regarding cladistic analysis of language, I do remember “clade” as a term of art, but I’m fuzzy on what that actually means (terms can be borrowed from physical sciences on analogy, but the details may not carry over, cf the bird called “robin”). A brief web search turned up this abstract, but I’ve not read the full text:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227810211_Cladistic_analysis_of_languages_Indo-European_classification_based_on_lexicostatistical_data
I recall being a bit skeptical on lexicostatistical methods in general, but I admit I also have no particular competing insight to offer. I’m also long out of the field, FWIW.
JMG & Forecasting @272
You both mention Islam regards France, but just how religious are any of the second/third generation youngsters living in certain urban areas? Ironically, I’d argue part of the issue that will lead to wider trouble is that the hierarchy of the drug gangs works above and through any power of control from the mosques. I suspect the pulling back of resources for ‘intelligence’ policing at the local level is also a huge factor – and that obviously links with the wider, slow collapse of our complex societies. Too complicated to manage.
(I’m seeing Nate Hagens’ choice of name for his blog in a slightly different light now – ‘The Great Simplification’ indeed.)
As of July 1st this year, a new flag has started flying in select locations in Alberta, Canada and, I believe Parliament Hill, Ottawa (I am waiting for solid confirmation of the latter). In all likelihood it will be flying in the US too, soon (maybe on some special holiday that is fast approaching?). It is called the Unity Thunderbird flag. Now that thoughts and words have been grounded in the world of action, I can speak of this flag directly. It is dominated by the traditional colours of black, white and red use by First Nations across the continent. The background is red (like the ‘red road’ of right conduct spoken of by First Nations). Upon it is the ‘medicine wheel’ divided into the four directions (coloured yellow, white, red, and black). Superimposed on the wheel are the two eagle feathers bound together in unity (those who are familiar with the symbol used for the Freedom Convoy will recognize it) and behind the feathers is a powerful symbol which is sacred to First Nations and Hindus (among others) but has been associated with hatred, domination and genocide by certain political movements over the past 90 years (especially in Germany but now in much of the Ukraine).
Flying this flag of the Thunderbird is likely hitting a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat. Those who are behind this flag know it only too well and are willing to pay the price for it. For a long time, First Nations have been upset about how one of their most sacred symbols was usurped and can bear it no longer. There is a prophecy associated with this movement for which numerous ‘signs’ were given to identify the ‘warrior of unity’ who would lead it. One such warrior was presented to the clan mothers some time in the 1980s, but certain signs were lacking. Early this year another such warrior came forward and was interrogated for 18 hours by the clan mothers, who stated that all the signs have been met. This Cree ‘warrior’ has received the blessings of 400 clan grandmothers across the continent (including the Hopis, which carries a huge amount of weight). The Unity Thunderbird flag is merely the tip of the iceburg; the ‘underwater’ part involves over-riding the power of the modern corrupted version of the symbol with the ancient pure power with which it was revealed to mankind (I will say no more than that at present). The belief / prophecy is that this activity will help greatly in creating a spirit of unity of peoples at many levels. May it be so!
People who feel inspired by this news and are of the praying type are invited to pray for the sake of unity of our peoples in a world in which those who ‘at the helm’ seem hell-bent on dividing us and feasting on the spoils that such division produces. If anyone is interested in what’s up with this, I can provide news as and when I receive it on future open posts.
Hi Heather,
Thanks for the kind words! It’s raining here again so the beans will probably grow a fair bit this week. I grow some string beans that we eat, although ones that we missed dried on the vines and I saved them to replant. I grew something called “sunset runners” last year which are like a tough string bean, but you leave them and end up with a dry bean for cooking (although we actually didn’t try them in the end), but I got so much that I was able to plant a ton of these this year – mostly because they make a really pretty flower and the bees seemed to love them.
This year I am growing almost half those. It ought to make the whole the whole set up a little more ornamental, which I try to do to keep the neighbours happy (not that they are mad, the folks directly around me seem entertained by the project). I planted some tulips in the pandemic because I thought it’d be a nice reminder of the strange bubble the economy was in at that time, and so that we’d be contributing in a more normal way to helping to beautify the neighbourhood too. I try to go half way between my nuttier projects and more normal ones in an effort to keep people on board.
This year these bamboo and twine structures are really quite big, in past years I built them up as I needed them, but not this time, and right now they are very elaborate – I think in about 2 weeks they will be covered enough to make some sense, by a month they’ll seem to serve a logical purpose, and by 2 months nobody will have a clue what they are looking at.
I’ve never heard of cotton rug wrap – I’ll look into it!
Thanks,
Johnny
I agree that languages can have more than one, and in fact more than two parents, plus fields of change rolling over language areas. I’m a bit confused about using cladistic analysis, since the methods I know in biology assign each clade to exactly one larger clade…
Patricia,
I volunteered with an amateur radio club in Canada until a few weeks ago, when I found out that I would be legally required to sign documents saying I would, under no circumstance, say anything which could be construed to support fears about cell phone radiation (Note, not just anything which supports those fears, but anything which could be construed to support those fears); and that I agreed with the “scientific consensus” that there was no such risk. I quit once I spoke to a lawyer who told me that a) the government can make us sign it, as a condition of remaining members of the society, b) it would probably be legally binding, and if not, I’d need to get the Supreme Court to rule on it, with all the costs and time that entails, c) depending on how the agreement is worded, truth may not be a valid legal defense here, and d) the provision saying I cannot discuss it, even with my lawyer, once I sign might actually be legally binding as well; since I wasn’t able to show the forms to him, he couldn’t say if there might be defects, but these have held up in courts before.
This was sent to us after someone realized that a lot of hams here don’t have cell phones, asked why, and then reported us when we started spouting “pseudo-science”, also called our legally required training.
I wonder if this crackdown on fears around EM radiation might have gotten others before i even heard of it, such as the professor you mention; and fighting it in court would be nearly impossible once these kinds of agreements are signed. Since the government can legally require people to sign it in order to maintain certain positions, or access to funding, or a host of other things, it becomes easy to see why people would sign it; and then once you do, I’m not at all sure how you can explain what’s changed. Ghosting might be the only viable response.
Something else has just clicked: if the internet has needed to be propped up by governments since the Dot Com Bubble burst, then given that the internet only appeared to be viable during the 1990s because of massive amounts of venture capital money flowing into a speculative bubble, it is entirely possible that it never made economic sense at all. If this is the case, then the rise of the internet may be part of why there’s been so much economic dysfunction for the last 30 years or so.
If so, then it seems possible to me that as disruptive as its collapse will prove to be, if it’s allowed to implode, then this may relieve a lot of the pressures on societies around the world regardless of what else happens; which suggests to me that if the internet is allowed to collapse, then perhaps the next round of stabilization could be along once things settle down from there. (Globally, anyway.)
Chaquin @ 322, I find library burning beyond barbarism. I see it as expressing an ideology which says: No one but us gets to have a history. Cultural nihilism? There is a former gothic church, now a mosque, on the Moslem end of Cyprus of which I have seen pictures. No graven images, so the glass and statuary are long gone. A gothic church without its’ ornament is a dead church, and this one looks dead in the photos I have seen. While I know little about spiritual matters, having been raised by judgmental atheists, I cannot believe that any good can come of worship in a dead zone.
I absolutely do not idealize foreigners or immigrant descendants. The neo-con fanatics who have wormed their way into our govt. are nearly all descended from fairly recent Mittel European refugees in the middle 20thC, and they despise Americans. Just one example: our Attorney General was recently in Ukraine, where he had no business being, trying to set up war crimes tribunals to prosecute Russians once the current war is won!! I do not exaggerate. I wish this were not true. His excuse for dereliction of his actual duties was moral responsibility, if you please, to oppose “authoritarianism” because his grandparents had had to flee Hungary. Last time I looked at a map, Hungary was some distance from Ukraine, nor are they adjacent. Furthermore, what possible moral duty can he have had to ally with Nazis in Ukraine?
This is what we are dealing with here in the USA, and we need to find a way to turf these folks out of govt. and other positions of influence before they get us all killed. If Mme. Wolf is looking for demons, she could begin with Ares, who demands to be worshiped in blood.
JMG, and others, as for war in the coming deindustrial age becoming a matter of defence rather than offense: that is expected in the Age of Aquarius, in which partition and the breakup of huge empires is going to be the name of the game.
@JMG (#306) on publishing Seymore and Hartley’s manuscripts:
It probably would be possible for someone in the UK with good research skills to do that, if s\he also has a good relationship with the keepers of the Inner Light archives. Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki made a good start with her fine book The Forgotten Mage: The Magical Lectures of Colonel C.R.F. Seymore (Thoth Publications, 1999).
Siliconguy, thanks for this.
JillN, interesting. I’ll want to see his evidence.
Luke, hmm! Yeah, Jung would find that highly symbolic.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
John N., glad to hear it. What I have in mind is simply the use of cladistic-style analysis on languages to find synapomorphies (shared derived characteristics) on a large scale and analyze current ideas about language origins on that basis.
Jay Pine, doesn’t matter at all. The young rioters are the shock troops; once the existing system is disrupted enough to fall apart, the religious groups move into the vacuum. Replace “religious cadres” with “Bolshevik cadres” and you’ll recognize a familiar story. The tale can still have a different ending, but that will require a very forceful response, and the time frame for that isn’t unlimited.
Ron M, can you post a link to an image of the flag? If I’m reading your description correctly, the people who designed it and are deploying it are engaging in a high-risk, high-stakes gamble which they could win. My other question is the nature of this “unity warrior” and just how political his activity will turn out to be, but that’s not something anyone involved in the project should talk about a moment too soon.
Aldarion, of course it will be necessary to make changes in the methods, but I still think it’s worth trying.
Anonymous, good. I’ve been convinced for years that the internet is a titanic subsidy dumpster propped up by gargantuan direct and indirect subsidies. If it becomes unaffordable in a hurry, yeah, that could cause some very constructive changes.
Robert, thanks for this. I’ll ask around.
Flying Car reference alert!
Reese’s released an ad where it compares its peanut butter cups to flying cars. Guess which is the new apex of society? Good reference to our dependency on plastic credit, also. I wonder if someone in their ad department is growing cynical.
“Isn’t it absolutely bonkers that you can walk into a store, hand someone a piece of plastic, and they will willingly hand over Reese’s cups? Forget flying cars, this is it; we’re at the pinnacle!”
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/1gRO/reeses-cups-bonkers
Also, JMG has in the past mentioned the need for subscription libraries to better serve the interests of different communities. It is starting to happen. In a nearby city, Christian homeschoolers have their own library/coffee house. More power to them, I say.
Newspaper article on their opening in 2021: https://tinyurl.com/raatsjju
Their websites:
https://www.heritagechildrenslibrary.com/
https://www.heritagemeetinghouse.com/
Joy Marie
@Luke Dodson: re: mycology: I agree it’s the psilocybin fad. Probably has its roots (mycelia?) in the same second-religiosity movement that’s suddenly sending huge numbers of people into our church, and possibly into any other venue that offers, or at least claims to offer, transcendent experience. People are deeply dissatisfied with scientism/materialism at the moment. From what I’ve grokked about the woke/mycology scene, magic mushrooms are the least threatening avenue to purported transcendence for the woke crowd, because there’s no spiritual discipline, no rules, no ascesis, no work involved. It’s fast-food drive-thru enlightenment for the fast-food drive-thru smartphone instant-gratification cohort. Sigh.
JMG
About the population and lack of babies cry out is part of the long standing song and dance where they use it as a justification to import more people\intedured labour while they do nothing or at least token moves like minimal child tax rebate increase or offer some extra money who very few are able to get due to neverending loops to hop over. I have seen this in several european countries its always the same scream about not enough babies then increase the immigration quotas meanwhile people struggle to put food on the table .
Also it probably it dawned on them a populance who doesnt have dependants is hard to blackmail into doing whatever they want without using police force which is pretty expensive regardless whereever you live . I saw this in china where local goverments try to make their citizens have more kids while at the same time if people protest something like money getting taken away from their social security accounts to pay for well off bureacrauts healthcare they immediately pull the “your kids wont be able to go to good schools ” card if you protest or cancel your social and medical state insurance. And i saw it during covid people who are on the edge of retirement getting retired, people who had nobody depending on them just leaving and getting part time jobs that dont require the vaccine etc people whos families were abroad they moved back. The only ones who complied were college studetns and parents who had kids to support everyone else just told the goverment to polish a stump. Unfortanetly there were lot of rumours in china after the covid lockdowns and endleess abuses by their goverment the fertility rates plumeted to bellow one . The chinese goverment refuses to release the data about their population since covid began . And there were credible videos where many hospitals merge their birth ward with gynecology because the births have gone done dramatically i am talking something 150 births per month in a local hospital pre covid going to barely 30. I am guessing something similar is going into usa .
As for caring old people the elites dont care they think there will enough african cheap nurses to care for them everyone else will be given option between crushing poverty or assisted suicide like they trial it now in canada.
@patricia
Thank you very much for the info! When I get a better idea of the time and season and such I may be back to ask more questions but this is a great start.
Best Wishes,
-WindMan
@JMG (#333):
Please let me know how things work out with the Seymore/Hartley project. It’s well worth doing, IMHO.
As for the Thunderbird flag which Ron M mentioned, here’s a photograph:
https://adrientherealist.com/products/house-banner
It strikes me as a high-risk move, too, but it just might work. The time feels more or less right for something along those lines.
Dear Mr. Druid
One expression that is used often of late, and for me I will credit this to The Duran podcast, is “no reverse gear.” This is used to describe our decision making and policy elites, especially in regards to Ukraine and Covid. Not only government but the corporate world as well.
Do you agree this is happening? And if so why now? Part of living and learning, whether as individuals or groups, is to try something, fail, use the failure as feedback and then try again. Instead we seem to keep doubling down. The inability to use the feedback mechanism seems to be accelerating our collective decline.
Hi, JMG. So far, I have not found any ‘still’ photos of the flag. Some of the best footage I have found is on FarceBook, but only those who have an account can view it. However, I have found a 10-second video on TikTok showing the flag upside down. It is held by said “unity warrior”, here: https://www.tiktok.com/@thunderbirdstore/video/7210283508013550853
The flag was already planted in front of the Manitoba (provincial) legislature during the winter, here (here it is rightside-up): https://www.tiktok.com/@thunderbirdstore/video/7210437703341493510
Maybe if I were not such a techno-dunce, I could be of better assistance.
Update: the Parliamentary Police in Ottawa (yes, there is a special police who are responsible for the federal parliament grounds) refused to permit the flag planting ceremony yesterday (July 1). The uphill battle begins.
I cannot say about the degree to which the “unity warrior” is political in nature or motives. I do know that he has been training as a medicine man for years in preparation for this work. Also, even though I am calling him a “unity warrior”, when the gathering of clan mothers asked him if he brings unity or division he shocked – and then delighted – them by stating that he brings division. At first this work will divide First Nations, communities and even families because it is so controversial. But this process of division will ultimately result in unity among many peoples. Reminds me of alchemical axiom “solve et coagula”.
Joy Marie, I wonder if they realize how brutally apropos that is. “We lied about the flying cars; the best you’re going to get is overpriced sugary junk that rots your teeth.” The library, on the other hand, is very good news! I hope others follow suit.
Emily, I don’t think it’s as rational as that. Most governments have a vast number of uncorrelated policies, each one pushed by pressure groups, with nobody paying attention to how they interact. Then everyone in power screams when things don’t go the way they’re supposed to.
Robert, I’ll keep you posted. Thank you for the photo — here it is for all to see:
A1, yes, and that’s why our governments and big corporations are plowing face first into one avoidable disaster after another. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re the smart kids in the room and the rest of humanity and the universe is supposed to do what the smart kids tell them. Do you recall the famous quote by Karl Rove? “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” That’s their attitude. It’s also what will be written on their death certificates, because if you convince yourself that the universe is obliged to do what you tell it, you’ve just handed yourself over to failure and destruction.
Ron M, thanks for this. A very, very interesting situation.
>One expression that is used often of late, and for me I will credit this to The Duran podcast, is “no reverse gear.”
Star Trekking across the universe /
Only going fooorward, ’cause we can’t find reveeeerse
https://invidious.tiekoetter.com/watch?v=M3k_CgzdR2s
Hi Ron M,
I am very much interested in news about the Unity Thunderbird movement and the unity warrior. I think something like this is long overdue and I will be praying for him and for the movement as a whole. Please keep us posted.
“One expression that is used often of late, and for me I will credit this to The Duran podcast, is “no reverse gear.” ”
That is a real problem. If Action A doesn’t work, then instead of undoing it and trying something else let’s double Action A. Drug policy, gun control, education policy, medical treatment, it doesn’t matter, if the results are not what was desired we need to do whatever failed even harder (as in throw more money, regulations, and government employees) at it.
I’ve seen it done in industry too, but there is a countervailing policy there that usual kicks in before too much damage is done, “last known good”. What was the last set of conditions that mostly worked or gave acceptable quality? If the change didn’t pan out then you back up to that, re-establish stable operations, and try something else.
@ Martin Back, I didn’t mean to give the impression that the gangs of LA are politically savvy. For the most part they’re not, and local law enforcement are pretty effective at keeping them in line. At least in the part of town I grew up in, gangs don’t last long largely because law enforcement slowly grind them down. The gangs are (or were?) mostly manned by boys and young men in dire need of effective male role models.
Other parts of “inner city” LA, though, have more established gangs (coming out of more established communities), but I still don’t get the impression that they’re that much more savvy…. But I don’t really know since I didn’t grow up there.
“The chinese goverment refuses to release the data about their population since covid began .”
I’ve been puzzled about an inconsistency on that topic.
A few weeks ago it was announced that India’s population had surpassed China.
https://www.un.org/en/desa/india-overtake-china-world-most-populous-country-april-2023-united-nations-projects
But a few years ago,
“India is expected to add nearly 273 million people to its population between now and 2050, a UN report said in 2019, forecasting that the country will cross China as the world’s most populous country by 2027. India will remain the most populated country through the end of the current century, the report said.”
So did India’s birth rate skyrocket since they collected the data for that 2019 report, or did some horrible misfortune befall China between 2019 and 2023? It’s not like there was an epidemic…oh wait.
Add to the reports of the lady who reported eight million cell phone numbers abandoned before she disappears, reports of portable crematoriums set up in several cities, the normal crematoriums going full tilt for months, and you have to wonder.
There was an early post talking about air travel delays due to weather or lack of air traffic controllers. Another excuse I’ve seen is that, for some reason, there is interference from 5G which is causing the delays. Anyone know anything about that?
JMG, you had an answer to Omer where you said “Religions that matter aren’t started by human beings — they’re started by gods.” We’ve often referred to Science or Marxism as religions, even if they (maybe) didn’t start out that way. What god/goddess do you think could have influenced either of them? Another question popped in my mind: can we even know? I have a feeling there might be a lot more gods out there than we puny humans can imagine.
Joy Marie
About the Internet not making sense economically. Here, “economically” refers to it making sense within our current economy in which all large factors of production are owned privately and used for private gain. I would contend that knowledge as a factor of production does not and never has fit well with private ownership of the large factors of production.
It is the nature of knowledge as a force of production that the folks who do the work to generate and distribute knowledge (and those who provide the relevant hardware) must be compensated. In our current system, this can only be done by limiting access to knowledge. However, the power of knowledge comes from its ease of multiplication and spread.
On the level of society as a whole, an Internet needs to generate enough benefit to justify the expense, but the fact that it cannot do so at the level of single corporations does not tell us whether or not it could do so for society as a whole.
Hi John Michael,
Thanks. That is a bucolic scene, and the buildings in the background are a touch more human scaled than many a city. A fine choice if I may say so, although there may be less ice and more water this past winter for you.
I agree too with your observation to Emily. At the core of this issue is an utter lack of a coherent vision as to what society is attempting to achieve. So, policies which are completely at odds with each other get pursued and they produce unintended effects. Take for instance the inflationary effects, which few economists or politicians appear to want to seriously grapple with – after all the public doesn’t seem to demand any better from them. But at the core of the problem is declining energy per capita, coupled with an expanding money supply due to out of control government expenditure. It’s not a complicated story, although you get told that it is.
Or the other gorilla in the room is the bonkers support for house price growth. I suspect people love that story, but in order to prop up the policy, we’ve had to grow the population by 500,000 people last year. This is not sustainable, but if you say that, you get shut down as a racist. It’s simply a policy choice among many paths. Yet the same politicians who don’t mention this policy choice, wring their hands over housing affordability. And honestly I’ve heard stories that the rental market is so tight that it’s being described as ‘The Hunger Games’.
There are winners and losers from all these choices, and no clear vision whatsoever. We could do better. But at the real core of it all is an utter disregard for limits.
Cheers
Chris
Isn’t Russia just a collapsed empire trying to re-establish itself and having a hard time doing so?
What attracted to you to Providence RI? How is it different from your experience living in Seattle?
Something else has been on my mind for a while: the talk of AI might be a game changer. I don’t mean to say I think there’s much to it: while the capabilities are impressive, they aren’t really that much more capable than they were a few years ago. It’s mostly, as far as I can tell, hype. But, it’s hype that makes sense to believers in Technological Progress; which is to say, most of the people making the decisions in the western world. There’s also, however, a myth of Those Who Embrace Barbarism, which says that it’s possible for society to turn it’s back on Progress, and so Progress is not inevitable. Normally, to believers in Progress, this is bad, but the first thing a lot of people think of when they hear AI is the rouge AI skynet from the Terminator movies, or the machines from the Matrix, and it seems plausible to me that this is playing a role in the thinking of the people with power.
The tech companies, seeking to increase revenue, have started making it sound like they’re close to AI, and it would not surprise me if the way in which so many of the stealth subsidies to the internet are getting cut is related to this, as the other power centres seeks to stop what they view as a major threat, possibly one on the level of human extinction.
It also, disturbingly enough, might help explain something else odd and deeply troubling: a lot of the changes on the part of the privileged classes makes a lot of sense if, at some subconscious level, they are embracing a new role as the People Who Stop Progress. These people are, in the myth, closed minded, bigoted, scared of the world, especially disease, stand against freedom, are hypocritical, are pathological liars, and are obsessed with their own power, even when it means throwing their own people into poverty.
If a segment of the privileged class are acting out this myth, then their goal, at a subconscious level, is to return to the past: a theocratic dictatorship without modern amenities, where intellectuals, gays, atheists, and pagans, are hunted down and killed; and where women’s rights do not exist. The idea that a large number of people throughout the political class have set their mind on making this a reality makes far too much sense of the last few years….
I just posted a speculation on some members of the privileged classes becoming The People Against Progress, and just had a very, very troubling realization about a minute after I hit post: this is perhaps inevitable, given the nature of the Myth of Progress, which clearly defines the type of person who stands against it, and the myth only the members of the West’s Comfortable Classes matter. If progress is coming to an end, then it must either be because they will it to happen, or because things outside of their control are bringing it about. Since nothing exists outside of their control, they must be willing Progress to an end. Therefore, they must be The People Against Progress.
This neatly allows them to square the end of progress and the belief only they can matter; and since it may be the only option available to them that does not require a complete rethink of their worldview, and possibly not even their self image (since The People Against Progress are often portrayed as delusional, it may actually help them fit their newly found mythic role for them to cling to the Myth of Progress at a conscious level), it may be that this is the only way the privileged classes can move forward.
JMG, concerning “The flesh of your future sticks between my teeth”…do you plan on releasing it in ebook form anytime soon? Thanks.
Joy Marie, that’s an excellent question to which I have only speculative answers. Marxism and scientism have the usual hallmark of a human-manufactured religion — a short shelf life — but during their eras of success, they got a lot of followers. It’s possible that someone or something nonhuman was behind them, but what? Hard to say.
Chris, that’s a good view of downtown Providence; the building on the right is City Hall. There are half a dozen old skyscrapers — one of them was the model for the Daily Planet building in the original Superman comics, but it’s mostly a very old, rather comfortable downtown. As for lack of coherence and disregard for limits, yep — and we all know how that story ends.
Roman, that was true twenty years ago. Now it’s a resurgent empire in the early stages of its expansion.
Joshua, Seattle used to be a very pleasant town; I grew up in the area and loved it. Then everything good about it got sold down the river so that real estate developers and software companies could rake in the bucks. It became physically filthy, full of dilapidated public spaces, and insanely overpriced — my current apartment in East Providence costs me less than a third of what I’d pay to rent a comparable place anywhere near Seattle. Meanwhile Providence is relatively inexpensive and is actively improving its public spaces — a fine new park has just been established on both sides of the Providence River just south of downtown, for example; here’s an image.
The bridge is for bikes and pedestrians only, and it has benches and other amenities. The river’s been cleaned up and is now full of fish and waterbirds. It’s a genuinely nice place to be — the way Seattle was many decades ago.
Anonymous, interesting. Hmm.
Bruno, you’ll need to contact the publisher. Authors don’t get to make that call!
“There was an early post talking about air travel delays due to weather or lack of air traffic controllers. Another excuse I’ve seen is that, for some reason, there is interference from 5G which is causing the delays. Anyone know anything about that?”
The frequency used by radar altimeters overlaps with certain, but not all 5G frequencies. So in some circumstances the 5G tower could cause an incorrect altimeter reading. Yes, some bureaucrat sold the same thing twice.
Making it worse is that the places most likely to use this frequency are places where a lot of people are in close proximity and all using their phones at once, like sports stadiums (no problem) and airports (Oops.)
@Joy Marie,
NASA, NOAA and the Navy all had objections to 5G, in particular the satellites, and yet 5G went forward. I was hearing a while back about interference from 5G at airports, but have not heard anything recently. Still, I would not be surprised to find out that has been ignored and airports are having to work around it somehow.
It may just be my biased opinion, but from what I am seeing, the imposition of 5G seems just as important to elite plans as the COVID vaccinations and teh related passports they want us all to have.
@Anonymoose,
Good Heavens! Thank you for this. I’ll pass this along discreetly.
I am actually surprised it is that bad. That reinforces my impression that 5G (and its successors) is critical to what these tyrants have in mind.
Siliconguy, you bet, socialists and fascists both insist that the ‘masses’ think what they’re told, speak as they’re told, and do what they’re told. And nowadays tolerance for dissent is something in increasing short supply.
There’s a lot of rhetorical flim flammery from Republicans and Democrats, or, more generally, progressives and conservatives. But, in either case, you MUST adhere to the approved doctrinal talking points, no matter how absurd, in fact, the more absurd the better. Why? Because, the more apparent pain you endure in repeating utter nonsense out loud, the more warmly you will be accepted into the fold, because of the pain you endured. Every patriotic American ‘knows’ that the 9-11 terrorists came down from Canada. Didn’t they? They didn’t, everybody knows they didn’t, but that isn’t the point is it? If you’re a patriot, you insist that they did. Every patriotic American ‘knew’ beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Again, Iraq didn’t, but never mind.
If you’re a Progressive, Trump collaborated with Russia. Forget that the proposition is preposterous on the face of it, Trump is a traitor. End of discussion. And he’s Hitler besides. And, if you really think all that’s true, then there’s no limit to what you’ll believe.
So, what’s the point of it? To get you to swallow lies. First, small lies, because they go down easier. But then bigger lies. And then some real whoppers. Pretty soon, with some inborn aptitude and some effort, you’ll become so adept, you’ll be swallowing whales.
In the end where does it lead? If you have the neurological suppleness and intellectual flexibility, or, IOW, for the truly talented in the art of cognitive gymnastics, complete disbelief in what your own eyes and ears tell you. For the less endowed, knowing enough to keep your trap shut when reality intrudes.
But the real point? More power and wealth for the point one percent. And the unwavering acceptance and defense of this result because it is good and it is just.
The Fremen insurgency has spread from Ecnarf to Muigleb and Dnalreztiws. One wonders how many new Islamic republics we will see arising in Europe in the near future.
https://policetribune.com/french-riots-spread-to-belgium-switzerland-reports-of-rioters-targeting-christians-conservatives/
It appears that James Burnham was right on target when he said “liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”
Ron M
Very interesting your information about the ” Unity Warrior”.bringing division.I wish I could remember the details of this better, but here goes. In the 1980s I was quite involved with various Native Americans/ First Nations in both spiritual and social issues: still am friends with some. I think this was in a workshop John Kimmey gave on the Hopi prophecy, but basically it was that all cultures would have to be shattered for the fourth world to emerge. Someone asked didn’t he just mean nasty materialistic western culture and he answered ” no, all” which blew some woke minds, though that word did not yet exist in its present context. I haven’t thought of this in years until you brought it up.
I don’t feel ready or qualified to look at every world culture in this context, but it is interesting for instance to look at Russia and wonder if it is a new culture growing out of the wreckage of the USSR. I don’t think the implication was ever that what arose would be totally divorced from the culture’s past, but that the existing forms would be shattered. There is certainly plenty of room for this in today’s west
JMG
I would certainly appreciate your input on this as well.
Stephen
@Mary Bennett
“Last time I looked at a map, Hungary was some distance from Ukraine, nor are they adjacent.” – Hungary does share some ~120 km of border with Ukraine.
I passed there in 2003 I think, traveling with my dad.
As far as I know there’s some stake for Hungary also because ethnic hungarians still live in all these countries around it, so Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Slovenia…
but that will probably not have too much to do with this Neo-cons descedant’s behaviour!
regards, Curt
JMG:
I take the opportunity of the Open Post, to raise an issue I am sure you will disagree with. Nonetheless, I ask that you hear me out.
This has to do with the issue of “gay marriage.” You have made a number of statements in previous posts, on both blogs, to the effect that those who oppose this are blue-nosed, busy-body, bossy-boot troglodytes, who are acting in bad faith from dishonest motives.
At the risk that you will tar me with the same brush, here is what I have to say about the subject.
I, like you, have a strong “civil libertarian” streak which stems (as with you) from the fact of being bullied in school for being “different.” I am just (barely) old enough to remember how homosexuals were “treated” in the early-to-mid twentieth century. They were “treated” with electroshock therapy (now banned in several European countries!), lobotomies and (in the case of Alan Turing) chemical castration.
Thus, when the “gay lobby” first got active, I supported much of what they were initially asking for. I, too, wanted an end to medical barbarism, and I, like them, saw no point in anti-sodomy laws (how do you enforce these, anyway?). As far as I am concerned, what two consenting adults do behind closed doors and closed curtains is none of my business, and (quite frankly) I really don’t want to hear about it.
So, why do I object to the concept of “gay marriage”? It is because the phrase represents an Orwellian corruption of language. I read Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” when I was in university, and that essay has had a lifelong influence on me.
In every culture and every historical period that we know of, marriage has always been understood as the union of a man and a woman, for the establishment of a family and the upbringing of children (if any). Even in the cases where the couple cannot conceive, the purpose was there.
Thus, it is impossible for a man to marry another man, or a dog, or a cat, or anything else. To say otherwise, is to distort language in an Orwellian sense.
Right now, we are currently in a situation where we are expected to embrace the bald-faced lie that “one can be born into the wrong body” or that a man can become a woman or vice-versa. In Canada (and soon in Michigan) it is a criminal offense to fail to affirm that lie. Yes, you can go to jail for stating obvious, self-evident truths! How did we get there?
I say, it started with Obergefell. In that ruling, a blatant lie was enshrined into law by judicial fiat. That is what opened the Pandora’s Box (or “opened the thunder-box” – I love that Spanish phrase!) which led to the current situation.
We are almost at the point that the denizens of the old Soviet Union had to endure for generations. These unfortunate souls had to read Pravda and Izvestia daily, not for the news (what a laugh!) but to know the official, compulsory lie du jour they had to utter, under penalty of imprisonment or worse.
Again, what two consenting adults do to establish their own domestic arrangements is none of my business. However, I will not affirm that lie that they are somehow “married.” There is no such thing – period.
This is not about civil rights, human dignity or common decency. This is about forcing people to gulp down stench and affirm a lie.
As far as “Gay Pride Parades” go, I say again, that these do not represent any demand for equal rights or human dignity, which gays and lesbians have achieved long ago. These parades, and the associated, screeching demands that everybody affirm(!!) their lifestyles and declare themselves “Allies(!!)” on pain of cancellation, loss of bank accounts and loss of livelihood, constitute an illegitimate demand for “narcissistic supply” on the part of personality-disordered people.
Think of it this way. How would everyone feel, if married couples with their children in tow, paraded down the streets stripping and fornicating in public? Most of us would rightly regard that as evidence of a serious psychiatric disorder. Why are “Gay Pride Parades” any different?
I say, with Solzhenitsyn, “DO NOT LIE! DO NOT TAKE PART IN THE LIE! DO NOT SUPPORT THE LIE!” We are all going to have to start setting boundaries that disturbed, narcissistic people are not permitted to breach. This is mine.
Thank you, JMG, for hearing me out. If the boundaries I have just set are not acceptable to you, please let me know, and I will withdraw from the commentariat.
Re: “no reverse gear”
Comedian Tom Naughton calls it attachment to the Grand Plan. Google his take on government efforts to get you eating properly in his blog post “Food Deserts and Grand Plans”.
“If the Grand Plan fails (which it usually does), The Anointed will never, ever, ever admit the Grand Plan was wrong. They will instead conclude that 1) the plan was good, but was undermined by people who are evil or stupid, or 2) the plan didn’t go far enough … which means we need to do the same thing again, ONLY BIGGER.”
Re: ‘knowing’ what other people think or feel
I’m not on the autism spectrum, but my mind does work a bit different than that of ‘normal’ people. If anything, I’m a bit more sensitive to social clues than most.
(When i was still on facebook I saw lots of people posting pictures of themselves with utter panic in their eyes while forcing a smile, but still getting lots of likes and positive comments. It hurts most when you see children having that look in their eyes, I can tell you)
My view is that most people have no clue what other people really think or feel, they just have a shared set of assumptions with other people in their group.
I’m very much not a group person, so I don’t share these assumptions and people can even get a bit offended when I don’t conform to them. They *know* how I feel, and if I say otherwise, then I’m lying.
–Fuzzy
@ Ron M #340 (and previous flag posts)
I am delighted to hear of this flag and the undercurrents of intention it represents. I have been finding feathers almost every day, over the past week or two, so I am minded to pay close attention, and also, prayers.
“Also, even though I am calling him a “unity warrior”, when the gathering of clan mothers asked him if he brings unity or division he shocked – and then delighted – them by stating that he brings division. At first this work will divide First Nations, communities and even families because it is so controversial. But this process of division will ultimately result in unity among many peoples. Reminds me of alchemical axiom “solve et coagula”.”
This forcefully reminded me of:
“I am not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10)
Ron, I will be very interested to hear updates about the Unity Thunderbird movement. I would pray, but I am in mourning until the beginning of August. I can resume praying then.
@ Methylethyl #158
“But they never turn the mirror around on themselves and ask if they can predict what *we* are thinking with any accuracy.”
Well… exactly!
@CodeSmith,
While it was not simultaneous, I once had a shared vision. I was at the Sengen Shrine in Fujiyoshida late one night and saw a vivid vision of a lady with her back to me in ancient Japanese style with long black hair and red and white kimonos and powerful flames rolling all around her, standing where her worshippers gather in the shrine. She turned and looked at me.
I went back to the parking lot and read the signboard there: the Mt. Fuji goddess, Konohanasakuya-hime no Mikoto, a name I was never to forget. Later on, I was leafing through a book on Mt. Fuji and found a picture basically identical to the vision I had seen, and when I read the caption, it was indeed she.
Regarding simultaneous deeply spiritual experiences, I’ve seen it happen twice, the first time on Olkhon Island and the second time in Zmeynaya Bay, both at Baikal in Siberia. The first time, I had a powerful vision, and noticed all of our group motivated to climb up separate hills as if seeking inspiration. Everyone had a spiritual experience then. The second time, I was the group leader and busy, but everyone in our group came to me and said they’d had a deep spiritual experience there like none they’d had before.
From my angle, there’s one fly in the ointment of the perception that real estate is going to get a lot cheaper across the board, and it’s being actively discussed in a different thread here:
The slow but sure loss of a lot of inhabitable land out West. Think about how many millions of people are going to be moving East and North over the next century or so. Not to mention inland from the coast, particularly Florida. The town I live in, in the mountains of North Georgia, has been on the receiving end of plenty of that climate migration for the past several years, in fact, and real estate here has gone crazy accordingly.
But I see this early wave as just a waypoint on the return journey to New England and the Great Lakes region.
Maybe owning real estate in the upper third of the country, east of the Mississippi, ain’t such a bad move…
Hey JMG
Something that has been occurring to me as I read things relating to how animals have been adapting to humans, such as crows using cars to crush nuts and microbes evolving to digest plastic, that such relationships should proliferate and become more complex overtime as humanity lives through its expected 10 million years on this earth.
Perhaps a few million years from now all kinds of creatures will have figured out ways to relate to us and make use of the products of civilisation that don’t exist yet or are only beginning to develop. Maybe epiphyte plants that specialise in growing inside smokestacks/chimneys to feed off soot, birds that rely on human hair to weave nests, dogs and cats far better able to understand and respond to their owners, marine life that relies on ships to migrate ect.
As to the riots in France: after 5 days, they are becoming less intense, but they are far from being over. Some rioters have used guns against the police, but so far no one has been killed. The house of a mayor has been attacked and burnt, his wife was severely injured while fleeing from the burning house with their children. It looks like the far left has discredited itself by supporting the rioters and looters and calling them “revolutionaries”.
According to an opinion poll, if elections were held today, Marine Le Pen would win against Macron. The French president has been incredibly clumsy and out of touch since the riots began, first throwing the policeman who shot young Naël under the bus in a very premature statement, then going to an Elton John concert. The presidential couple was then photographed being chummy with Elton and his companion.
I think that most French people now realize, as I do, that decades of mass immigration have filled the country with millions of people who will never identify as French, they simply don’t want to, and who needed only a pretext to erupt in violence. Nobody is denying that the rioters are overwhelmingly Black and Arab.
Our big problem is that there are so many unassimilated “visible minorities” in France now that normal peacetime institutions have become incapable of keeping the peace and enforcing the laws. Riots have also taken place in the French overseas territories (the Caribbean, Guyane, and La Réunion in the Indian Ocean) whose population is largely made of descendants of Africans.
France is in a recession which may never end (because of resource depletion, among other things), which means that many of the shopping malls and libraries that were burnt will not be rebuilt anytime soon.
Monte Cazazza’s suburban hell experience & juvenile delinquency:
“My parents had moved to the suburbs, which I detested immediately. I hated everyone that lived there. So in high school, literally, for one year I didn’t talk to anyone. Just went to school, sat in the very last seat in the first row, and didn’t talk to anyone because I didn’t like anyone there. No one knew anything about me, I was just this person, and mostly they left me alone. I didn’t have any friends in high school and I didn’t want any. The police, though, came to arrest me once. I had this business going where I would shoplift cartons of
cigarettes-my whole locker was fllled with cigarettes. And I was selling them to everyone very cheap. Teachers, everyone. I used to go into these 2 big
supermarkets with my gym bag and I would just fill it up with cartons of cigarettes and go home. And one time I got caught shoplifting. The store people called the police and they showed up. Somehow they flgured out
that I must have been doing this for a long time, because of their inventory or something. I don’t know how they added 2 and 2 together, but…first they
talked to me, and then let me go home. Later on they got a warrant to search my locker. So I’m sitting in history class and these police come in and tell me I
have to go with them. I wouldn’t tell them the combination of my locker, so they smashed it open and found the whole thing just totally fllled with
cigarettes. And I thought I really was in a lot of trouble then, but actually nothing else happened beyond that point. They just confiscated them all and told me I better not get caught shoplifting again … and I better not sell any more cigarettes….I think that because all the teachers were buying
cigarettes, they were all kind of implicated. They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was just trying to make money and better myself, in the American
way. The best thing was that I didn’t smoke!”
Hope my fellow American’s have a wonderful Fourth of July!
Two data points from Germany, if I may:
There are two large alternative media platforms here; one is a more rightish internet radio station, one a more leftish website.
In a panel discussion on the decline of German industry, the radio station’s founder mentioned the “accusations” that German mercantilism was responsible for destroying competitors, especially in Europe, and that an author of books on the limits to growth “dreams of degrowth”.
The website on the other hand is beholden to Keynesian doctrine – it sees the problem of mercantilism – with the answer to current inflation rates being that, first of all, it’s not a problem and interest rates should not be touched, but instead wages must simply rise considerably.
The Germans, as should have been stated by Churchill back then, can be trusted to do the right thing…
>There was an early post talking about air travel delays due to weather or lack of air traffic controllers.
That’s not what you should be worried about. ATC is making bigger and bigger mistakes. There was one piece of work, working the tower at SFO that I guarantee you, if she hasn’t been transferred, she will create a smoking hole in the ground. Don’t fly into SFO, I don’t know what’s going on with ATC there, whatever it is, it’s bad. But it’s not just SFO. Austin has had a spate of less-than-competent incidents involving ATC as well. Take your flight, place your bets.
>Another excuse I’ve seen is that, for some reason, there is interference from 5G which is causing the delays. Anyone know anything about that?
It messes with radar altimeters. You need to have a really fancy plane or an airliner to have one of those. If it’s part of the required equipment on the plane, it’s illegal to take off until it’s either fixed or working. Most other planes heed the ancient sacred air pressure readings from ATC though and that’s what they use to tell how high they are.
We’ve talked about worshiping at the altar of technology…this would appear to be the, or at least ‘a’, final installment.
https://stream.org/making-jesus-in-their-own-image-left-wing-groups-are-using-ai-to-re-write-the-bible-and-talk-to-god/
One has to wonder how hollow some people truly are.
I’ve contracted a long-term illness, in addition to having a tumor removed (no cancer remains), and so haven’t been contributing. I am hoping I have the where-with-all to change that.
I pray everyone stays safe (relatively) and enjoys holidays from work!!
JMG,
I think you’ve addressed this question before, but I’ll ask again. What changes are there in the text from the old edition and the new of Innsmouth? I have the hardback version of the original and it is a prized possesion.
AV
Greetings Mr. Greer,
Twas wondering, since you & you’re live but a hop, skip, and a jump from those who fish for New England’s mighty crustacean of note? So … I’m just curious, as you are of an omnivorous nature, that you may on occasion, nosh on said lobsters..
Oh, and lastly .. a murican **Happy • Blow • $__t • Up • Day** to you and the wife. Keep those philosophical incendiaries coming. And remember – Shields Up!
‘;]
Mr. Greer,
After seeing your response to Joshua’s re. Providence, and considering your suggestion a few months ago that I leave this incipient woke hellhole that is WA. State, perhaps for RI. … I’m curious as to what’s your take on availability rent wise for someone of limited income, of a place – say a one bdrm or studio – that’s not a veritable tenement .. or worse, such as can be found here in the city/county in which I currently reside? I’m paying $1000 mo. for a funky, but livable studio with a garage, which I find rather high-priced, considering that as of yet, I’m not bringing in any additional income. I could see myself making an extreme change of venue, given a chance to reside in a less crazy and
more affordable state/metropolitan surrounds. Also, what’s the employment scene/economy like there. I’m not talking FIRE work here.. (bad pun considering the impending holidaze, sorry) or anything hi-tech or ‘professional’, just something to bring in enough combined with my meager soc.sec .. to get by, whilst attempting to set up an endeavor or two lost through divorce.
a Biden 7cent penny for your thoughts.. hell, I’ll throw in a pre-1967 quarter. What say you.
@methylethyl #277,
Re. electric cars…”good for wealthy people in dense urban areas in moderate climates.” When I was looking last fall I was comparing used, Honda Fit to Chevy Bolt; the difference was about 10%, small enough that it was worth performing the experiment. Ironically, dense urban environments are probably unfit for electric cars; you really need to be able to plug in either at home or at work.
“They are a lot heavier than regular cars…” This I’ll concede and agree they should be taxed accordingly.
“They don’t work in extreme cold.” They do work, just not very well. The only people on the user groups for whom this has been a showstopper have been the Uber/Lyft drivers. And this will only be an issue for the next few years: https://www.anl.gov/article/an-electric-vehicle-battery-for-all-seasons.
“I live in a hurricane zone, and here, the sensible thing to do wrt electric cars, is ban them entirely.” Seems to me you’re using a double standard. For an ICE car, your standard is “keep your tank full June-November, and as long as you have enough to get to the next county, you’re usually OK.” For the electric, you require the car (at an arbitrary charge) to go an unlimited distance. My brother in FL tells me the first thing that happens before a hurricane is that all the filling stations run out of gas, and if the power fails they can’t pump it anyway. Remember, unlike an ICE car, mileage improves with reduced speed an an electric. And air conditioning is a relatively minor load. In stop-and-go traffic in 90F weather I’d estimate my Bolt would run for ~30 hours on a full charge. At 30mph I’d get 300+ miles on one charge. Granted on the “immerse in salt water” though.
To those who were wondering about the Hungarian portion of the Ukrainian population, this shows it concisely.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethnolingusitic_map_of_ukraine.png
It’s also worth remembering that Lviv (Lvov) was part of Poland once, but it was ethnically cleansed at the end of WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Poland_and_Soviet_Ukraine
Beware of rabbit holes, my last comment led me here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_Territories
And this quote;
“Historian John Kulczycki argues that the Communist authorities discovered that forging an ethnically homogeneous Poland in the Recovered Territories was quite complicated, for it was difficult to differentiate German speakers who were “really” Polish and those who were not. The government used criteria that involved explicit links to Polish ethnicity, as well the person’s conduct. Local verification commissions had wide latitude in determining who was or was not Polish and should remain. Their decisions were based on the nationalist assumption that an individual’s national identity is a lifetime “ascriptive” characteristic acquired at birth and not easily changed. However people who “betrayed” their Polish heritage by their political words or actions were excluded from the Polish nation. Everyone else was labelled as “Polish” and had to remain in their “native” land – even if they wanted to emigrate to Germany.[80]”
That sort of inherited nationalism is supposed to be characteristic of fascism, not communism. So much for that belief.
“millions of middle class people have built their entire plans for their future around the idea that their home will appreciate in value, and can be sold off to help pay for their retirements.”
How is that even a *thing* – to imagine that you will sell your home out from under yourself in exchange for a retirement?
A retirement where, exactly?
All the Millennials around us are either single or childless couples. There are no kids. Aren’t these Millennials already “collapsing now?” Looks like this generation will be the first not to reproduce itself. Isn’t this a good thing?
@Fuzzy re: other people’s thoughts: “shared set of assumptions”
Yes, that, exactly.
I do fit most definitions for ASD, and one of the weirder things I’ve grokked about it over the years is that the “socially clueless” isn’t as clear-cut as the psych definitions make it out. They’re right, I miss social cues, never know when to leave, when to talk, when not to talk, what’s appropriate, or what other people need from me. But they’re wrong about the not being able to understand subtext or body language or social undercurrents. I *can* grasp those– just not by the normal routes and not on a normal timescale. Because I lack the shared assumptions, I can often pick up stuff that other people can’t, don’t, or won’t see, because it violates their assumptions.
@JMG
I was speaking yesterday to a cousin of mine who is a physicist specialising in rheology. He told me that he does low-cost experimental research as opposed to modelling, as he did not get an ‘intuitive feel’ for the subject while modelling, while experiments give him that ‘intuitive feel’ – in fact, he told me very clearly that one should model a given phenomenon if and only if one understands the subject well enough to give a lecture on the subject, or at the very least, have a technical conversation with an expert on the subject. Thus, in my case, since the area of application as regards my modelling work is human physiology, he advised me to study not just a mathematical view of the subject, but also the subject as seen and studied by a medical student; in his view, that is the only way one can actually build models that not only fit data well, but also make sense – else, it’s just like the COVID-19 modelling fiasco or the stock market crash of 2007-08, where ever more elaborate models with ‘bells and whistles’ were built by physicists who had no real understanding of the field they were modelling.
Reflecting on his advice also reminded me your essay on the three types of knowledge, namely, episeteme, gnosis, doxa. The deepest of those three (I forget which one of those it is) is the kind of stuff one knows in his/her bones. So, my question is, how do I move from an outer-layer understanding of any subject to a know-it-in-my-bones level of understanding? What general strategy would you recommend, if any? I am personally a pro-self learning type of person; I prefer (carefully selected)books to lectures.
@Citrine Eldritch Platypus: re: that Erica Marsh tweet:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/limitations-monday-july-3-2023-c
The “Erica Marsh” account turns out to probably be a clever psyop run from Belgium?
@Oilman2
Best wishes to you, and thank you for all your present contributions to this blog for all of us others!
@Michaelz
I think German mercantilism has long been a pain to other EU members, I think chiefly also France, and I would not be surprised if secretly these EU members are happy about German decline, and Poland now finds a good lever to extort goods and services from its old rival.
@Horzabky
Recently I haven’t followed the news much, but boy this looks like something else this time! The 2005 riots weren’t nothing, but maybe more like a bigger mob of hooloigans like in the nineties, destroying stuff, but not yet really political.
Mayors house burned down, with possible intent to kill his wife and children? Whoa, that IS something else.
As for the discussion about immigration and culture: I think there are two, even three relevant angles:
1) youth unemployment (obvious one)
2) human mass effect of group building by comparable circumstances (a constant of history)
3) contact of said groups to foreign established political institutions, states amd also family ties
Now for the last one – firstly I would not be surprised, if states like Algeria (as mentioned somewhere) would throw the UNO reverse card and instigate political turmoil in the West where they can, now that a new anti-western block is forming in the world, gaining momentum.
And how the president of Congo lectured Macron like a little schoolboy – historic! Not the norm these past decades, not at all.
Our Austrian media are now reporting on the France riots, more than on the dutch farmers or otherwise.
I guess if a thing becomes TOO big in the heart of Europe – it will make established media shiver to NOT report on it and lose all credibility at once, a too obvious gap by then.
Lastly, about the question of culture again: yes, the ethnic component is strong and obvious here. I think there’s a difference between Mexican cartels and say, the muslim broderhood. The first is clearly a warband, sometimes tying to political structures but not yet itself are real political, geopolitical player, while the latter is an established political structure, fully with an administrative appartus and the backing of several powerful states, with a secret violent arm of action, and ties to mercenaries, not directly warbands, but sellswords.
In South America, youthful violence is certainly hot, couldnt be worse. But that one angle, a hard ethnic, religious, political, transnational division, I think what we see in the EU is way different, I think despite the EU still being Way more harmless and peaceful in terms of violence than man SouthAmerica places, this thing still is the much bigger bomb!
@Michael Martin
I would concur with you marriage has an originate and obvious cause in the reproduction of a society as well as in the core household and unit of a society, even for couples without children. All these other things on the other hand – they are hate for reproduction, hate for family (putting one’s social life over consumerism and careerism), fear of a vital society having other ideas….
@Citrine Eldritch Platypus
“One wonders how many new Islamic republics we will see arising in Europe in the near future.”
Oh my, I wonder about that too! Here in Austria, it has been mostly turkish nationalism, also not funny, but last autumn and winter has seen the first mini-mini-rioters in the same vein!
Still nothing at all compared to France, UK….but definitely a very dangerous cause!
Austria is so quiet still, mostly, a little island…but within an increasingly stormy sea…
islamic caliphates? Oh, I am really wondering how things will pan out along that kind of divide…
Should I convert already?
———————————————————————————————————
Is there any heathen goodwish, though my main symbolism remains judeo-christian, but in light of this situation towards the other ecosophians?
And thanks to you all for your contributions and stories, there are always real jewels of interest in here, and thanks to the host.
regards,
Curt
Regarding Machine Guns: In the World War Z novel mg’s are discarded in favor of semi-autos as it was necessary to conserve ammo and take careful headshots. Note that in Ukraine they expend at least 150 rounds for every actual hit. Both fiction & reality suggest mg’s will not be as ubiquitous in the future.
Regarding Conformity: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” covers snap judgments and biases, including the general tendency towards conformity and respect for authority. No idea why people are wired the way they are, but — as with Mattias Desmet’s work — usually only 20% of the population don’t automatically follow or just go along with whatever the latest narrative tends to be. I’m definitely one and know many but we’re definitely a minority, and it’s not tied to any specific condition or genetics.
Regarding Peak Oil: Conventional peaked in 2008 and all evidence points to the peak in Shale has past as well. IMHO the instability we’re seeing in all things are symptoms of this and will only increase.
Regarding the SMO: It would appear Prighozin’s actions were somewhat expected and used to smoke out disloyal elements within Russia; still doesn’t look good but Hersh notes it ultimately serves them. BTW, I’m still amazed at how many observers watching the same conflict have 180 degree opinions of what’s actually transpiring. I follow all sides and can’t help but be disheartened at the ridiculous level of polarity. But then again there’s still a huge portion of the population clinging to the original c19 narrative.
Greetings all!
Forecasting intelligence said: “the emergence of a Muslim dominated France”
With due respect to you sir, do you realise that muslims are only about 5.6% of the french population. Admittedly in Paris it is higher, still, I doubt that 17 years old kids can take power in a country with a standing army of 120,000 and with a police force of 150,000 and armed to the teeth! Note that rioters only have fireworks (which says a lot about their firepower!) to use against the police and no deaths reported yet. The parallel with the french revolution of 1789 is not that convincing given the power of the armed forces and police in France.
Furthermore, although most rioters are children of 2nd or 3rd or even 4th generation immigrants, I doubt very much that most descendants of immigrants actually support the rioters. Note that riots are already subsiding.
Europeans (especially in France) have been frightening themselves to death about muslims for the past 20 years now, convinced that in a near future europe will become an islamic protectorate.
In the meanwhile the famed “banlieues” suffer from serious neglect with little prospects for gainful employment, especially given that France has been busy delocalising its industries elsewhere as quickly as possible. Lets not mention the incessant discrimination many of these descendants of immigrants face daily.
Mix all that together and you inevitably get a situation that turns sour occasionally. I would not be surprised that this cocktail actually serves the interests of the very rich who have a ready scarecrow at hand and whose main purpose is to prevent the down trodden in France to unite and face the very powerful. Divide to rule, remember!
Poor France…
PS: I am not French, I don’t live in France but my mother tongue is French, go and figure!!!!
Regards to you!
@JMG #290 + Robert Mathiesen #294 & ALL,
I found “20th Century Magic and the Old Religion: Dion Fortune, Christine
Hartley, Charles Seymour”, which is an expanded version by Alan Richardson, while I
was searching for “The Dancers to the Gods”. There’s some solid research by Richardson in this volume!
This popped up while searching with (Startpage) for “The Dancers to the Gods”,
YMMV. I’ve been getting better results lately with Startpage, over DuckDuckGo,
or… you know Who! Careful Wording of the search term/s is as important as their
“algorithm/s”, and what crevices their bot crawler has been to!
Here’s the ToC of 20th Century Magic:
1) The Priestess in the Orchard; 2) The Dancers to the Gods; 3) The Magical Record;
and 4) The Old Religion essay by Charles Seymour. Holy Wow!
Also found Christine Hartley’s “The Western Magical Tradition”, which is heavily laden
with Merlin, Arthurian, Atlantean and Celtic material, but also how that relates to the
other traditions surrounding and contributing to Britain as well. It’s a real find also!
“Enjoy Independence Day, Folks!”, there are “those” who want to take it from us!
CodeSmith
@JMG.
I am jealous of the new bridge oand riverside park. Out here, when we have built a pedestrian/walk area and/or park it immediately gets taken over by the transient drug/theft crowd and the regular citizens can’t use it. I hope this does not come to your area
Also, unless the is some kind of coat/west difference, I read Witch of Criswell, and enjoyed it and look forward tot ehnext installment. But, you say that the protagonist is wearing “boy shorts”. You should put it in your notes for revision in a few years to just have her put whatever int eh pocket of her shorts, or jean shorts, or whatever, because boy shorts are a type of women underwear. A particular cut that covers more, kind of like mens jockey shorts ( not briefs) cotton knit material, but with shorter legs and feminized some. Thus boy shorts.
jmg @170 – In regards to Prigo’s Plan – maybe its cia funds. sy hersh’s substack may report so soon. methinks truth is stranger than fiction; nothing more or less than it seems, the surprise rash ambitious act of a war lord in the throe of glory and nothing more. Imagine to a man like Prigo operating for so long from within the fog of war it seemed like his shadow loomed huge. Putin played the advantage as best he could; reinforce the message of tolerant privilege for the fighting. Prigo going to Belarus allows Putin to save face. Will be interesting if any extradition or further exile is sought. cheers!
Hi JMG and all; I have an almost-six year old boy who loves The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series and all books magical and fantastical. What might you all read to him? He’s quite the ravenous little listener at this point.
I also wonder how to support his magical leanings in a world that doesn’t generally do so. I want to help him be grounded AND keep the door open to reality being much, much more than he’s going to hear about from society.
Thanks for any suggestions!
This is a second attempt. [does anyone understand why I might be receiving “nonce verification failure” error messages when I attempt to post comments?]
Jeff, thanks for the idea. You’ve given me something to actually chew on here (and journal about) as to WHY the scrying has been lackluster. Much appreciated.
Platypus, one way or another, things are going to get very interesting indeed.
Michael, you have the right to have your own opinion and to advocate for it, of course. Myself, I don’t find this kind of essentialist argument convincing at all. I could get into it with you over logic — the fact that something hasn’t been done before is no valid argument against doing it; that’s the ad antiquitatem logical fallacy, and you’re combining it here with the consensus gentium fallacy, the notion that the majority is always right — or over historical fact — there have in fact been same-sex marriages in some cultures in the past, though it’s a minority habit. The crux of my disagreement with you, however, is that arguments of the “some consenting adults are doing something I disapprove of, and I’m offended!” type are just as dreary when they come from the right as when they come from the left.
Fuzzy, interesting. Thanks for the data point.
Grover, oh, in the long run, that’s going to put a floor under real estate prices. My working guess, however, is that there’s so much air in the real estate market that once the gimmicks give way, it’s going to be a while before the panic selling gives way to stability.
J.L.Mc12, that’s a fascinating idea. Thank you!
Horzabky, thank you for the update.
Michaelz, and thank you for the data points.
Oilman2, good to hear from you. I’m sorry to hear about the health issues; would you be interested in having the prayer group here send some positive energy your way?
AV, some typos and edit-os got corrected. Other than that, the new edition is identical to the older one.
Polecat, I do indeed eat lobster from time to time. Yum! As for moving to Rhode Island, it’s tolerably easy to find decent studios in the $800-1000 range, and you can get cheaper than that if you have some patience. Work is readily available — every other business I walk past has help wanted signs out these days. I don’t happen to know what wages are like, as I haven’t been anybody else’s employee for a long time.
Siliconguy, eastern Europe consists entirely of pieces of land claimed by at least three different ethnic groups.
Scotlyn, why, in retirement apartments, of course. No matter what you have in mind, the US economy has something stupid to sell you!
Roman, it’s a standard feature of collapsing societies, so not surprising to see it here.
Viduraawakened, since your field is human physiology, you need to have hands-on contact with living human bodies. You might consider studying massage, and giving and receiving massages; that way you can learn the human body in the nonverbal, personal way that you need.
Karim, thanks for this.
CodeSmith, glad to hear it. I’ll have a look at Startpage.
River, “boy shorts” are what the women I know call loose baggy shorts with pockets.
Jstn, it’s definitely something to wait and watch.
Erica, Alan Garner’s early books, especially The Weirdstone of Brisingamen; any and all of Patricia McKillip’s fine fantasy novels; and if you can get them — they’re out of print — Joan North’s children’s fantasies The Cloud Forest, The Light Maze, and The Whirling Shapes would be high on my list.
Temporaryreality, hmm! I have no idea. I’ll check with my IT guy.
JMG wrote
Roman, that was true twenty years ago. Now it’s a resurgent empire in the early stages of its expansion.
With Vladimir Putin playing the role of Charles Martel…
@Erica: I’d throw Susan Cooper’s *Dark is Rising* books in the reading stack. I enjoyed them when I was young, and also enjoyed Narnia and LOTR.
@Kareem #390 “Note that rioters only have fireworks” – The media is busy dowmplaying it, but on twitter there is plenty of footage of protesters shooting all kinds of weapons including AK-47’s Also military grade explosives are being used against police stations etc. (For example see https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1674699112183132160 and https://twitter.com/DominikSerwacki/status/1674929388016500738) There also seems to be a high level of organization going on (https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1674895332411408385)
You are right that the banlieus have been neglected and that the inhabitants face adverse circumstances. That contributes to the problem although I doubt that it is the most important factor. The large scale burning of libraries, schools, public transport vehicles and police stations strikes me more as an acts of hatred against the society that harbors them and not just expressions of frustration. The fact that Switzerland and Belgium have also riots by the same group points more to ethnic solidarity and shared ideology than concern about police violence in another country.
I think this is a massive wake-up call for the French. In contrast to previous outbursts, the violence is now even in small towns like Bonneuil that has just 15,000 inhabitants (https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1675798994428067843). That means that many MSM-trusting boomers and PMC-types in their self-referential bubbles are now being confronted with raw violence that can’t explain away. It also helps that upscale shops all over the country are being looted. Of course Macron will still succeed in hiding the true scale for part of the population, but many others will wake up. I’m afraid the results will not be pretty.
@Temporaryreality: I get the nonce error sometimes too. As with all stuff-didn’t-send errors, I take it as a sign from the heavens that I should seriously reconsider what I’ve written, and perhaps not post it 😉 I’m also weirdly delighted to see the word “nonce” in an internet error message.
@Michael: the gay marriage campaign in the US: it was in a way the death knell of the Moral Majority movement, and good riddance. At the same time, I think we religious really, really missed the boat on that one. We could, and should (while we still had some political clout) have leaned into what the other side’s propaganda *said* they wanted: hospital visitation, inheritance rights, co-insurance, tax filing status, etc, and pushed *hard* for something like civil domestic partnerships– some sort of legally-recognized domestic status *completely* divorced from sex, that could be used to easily confer some of the rights of marriage, between any consenting adults, including biological family members, long-term roommates (think about your classic Boston Marriage– two old spinsters living together to save on rent and heating costs), or even good friends (it could be a layer of legal protection between you and the dysfunctional family you’ve worked so hard to escape), cohabiting straight couples, and of course also gay partnerships. There are so many reasons to allow that– in my own family, two of my grandparent’s siblings, a widow and an old bachelor, both childless, shared a home for the entire second half of their lives, taking care of their aged mother and then looking after each other. There was nothing untoward about the relationship, and everybody respected their designating each other to inherit, make medical decisions, etc. I think they should have also been able to file taxes jointly and be included on each other’s insurance. Perhaps that’s a naive take on it, and I’m missing something glaringly obvious, but… possibly we wouldn’t be where we are now, if we had read the wind better then. Or not. Maybe this was always the goal, and we’d have wound up here regardless. Who knows?
I propose the super secret handshake for the Coalition of the Distrustful: Just stand there with your hands in your pockets: “you go first.” After a moment, you make solid eye contact, and get down to business 😉
@ JMG RE: prayer
I am not a man so arrogant as to shun efforts to help me; prayers most welcome! I have been learning my rebuilt colon and learning to walk again – long row to hoe ahead.
I will not go dark unless the net goes down. I have my whole getaway place readied, but alas – I cannot play farmer with my body wracked as it is and I need things rural Doctors simply do not have.
So my plans have bee passed to my progeny, who are more likely to use it at this point. I now know why the old men in the early west just sat in saloons or on the porch of the dry goods store…their hips and knees and backs just didn’t let them do much more…
I will try and rejoin the fray here – it’s good for my brain.
Thanks to all.
@Michael Martin (#363):
It is always very risky to posit any human cultural universal. There certainly are traditional cultures where for countless centuries it has simply not been true that — as you wrote — “In every culture and every historical period that we know of, marriage has always been understood as the union of a man and a woman, for the establishment of a family and the upbringing of children (if any).”
One such culture is that of the Navaho, according to a Navaho student I knew at my university. She told me quite clearly that in her own traditional Navaho culture a child is always reared by its mother and its mother’s brothers, not its mother and its father. The child’s father, too, will play the necessary male role in raising Navaho children, but those children whom he raises will be the children of his sisters by other men, not his own genetic descendants.
Anthropologists, in point of fact, have documented not just these two patterns of child-rearing (ours and the Navahos’), but several others in addition. They all work well, each in the context of its own culture.
Karim, didn’t a small group of Mongols and later a small group of Manchus take over big China?
JMG – The dreaded “nonce failure” error message is one that I see when I spend so much time reading one set of comments, and drafting a response, that the entire page has been updated in the mean time, maybe more than once. The solution is to draft comments off-line, refresh the page, and then submit. That’s never failed for me.
Mr. Greer, thank you for your imput.
That said, I’m just about be willing to go with any indecent studios/whathaveyou BELOW the $800 – $1000 range IF I were allowed to keep bees … a few laying hens …. a small garden plot…. AND enough E-juice to run a modest ceramic kiln. I’d give up the sacred AUTO, take the bus, ride a low cc scooter, etc. etc. ANYTHING to have some modicum of control over what remains of my life force on this good earth!
RE: Electric Cars
I’m surprised no one has said, so I’ll say it…
Arguably one of the best solutions to climate change is that we humans change our behavior. Especially when it come to everyone driving everywhere in their own metal box. The dream of electric cars is that we can keep our cake and eat it too. It’s an excuse to keep doing what we’re doing and not change. See? Easy!
JMG has talked often of the internet, such as it is, not being sustainable in a cost vs benefit analysis – whatever costs we’re looking at.
A recent discussion elsewhere made me look at some of the censorship issues.
This article –
https://archive.vn/I2Cmu
– talks about how Google (despite its denials) interferes with search results. Notably, they boost ebay, Amazon and the like – beyond what’s required to fulfil their advertising contracts (“sponsored search result”). They go beyond because of the good old 80/20 rule, a majority of their revenue is going to come from a few big companies.
But this also means they suppress “controversial” content. Because large corporations don’t like controversy. “Is Classic Coke or New Coke better?” is about all they can handle.
And this –
https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-social-media-regulation/
– is an interview with one of the founders of the discussion site reddit. He sold it to the same corporation owning Wired, so the Wired interview is of course sympathetic – but this also means that whatever they say we can take as showing what they really think. They say,
“stripped back to the pre-Nazi message board feel, with guardrails to stop the darkest content encroaching, much of the site feels familiar and comforting for early millennial internet users—largely wholesome, consciously strange, filled with ironic shitposting, earnest advice, and adverts for health drinks. There’s one subreddit with more than 300,000 members that’s just pictures of bread stapled to trees. It’s called r/breadstapledtotrees and while it’s not the most active of communities, six years after it was created it’s still going. “I’m trying to stay positive through some things right now and stapling a tortilla to this tree makes me happy,” one user posted last month.”
Avoid controversy, embrace triviality, be thoughtlessly happy all the time. Somebody read Brave New World and took it as an instruction manual.
So this is more evidence for what JMG has described, that the costs vs the benefits of the internet will over time change. The costs are so high that those in charge are doing their best to reduce the benefits – because what benefits us as internet users is merely a cost to those who provide it.
@Stephen: funny how certain incidents or words can suddenly trigger long-forgotten memories or connections. Thanks for sharing what you had heard about Hopi prophecy from John Kimmey – there’s always a lot more ‘water’ that can be drawn from that very deep ‘well’!
@Scotlyn: interesting regarding feathers and swords (and thanks for the scriptural reminder)!
@Patricia O: please accept my condolences; glad to have piqued your interest, though, and appreciate your offer of prayers to the unity thunderbird cause when the time is right.
And Robert – thanks for weighing in on the issue and for the photo: if you ever challenge me to a duel for finding images online, I think that I’ll just eat humble pie and declare you the victor in advance.
JMG: thanks for having these open posts so that news of some of the more obscure yet potentially significant socio-cultural-occultish happenings can be mentioned and discussed.
Greetings all!
Citrine Eldritch Platypus said: “One wonders how many new Islamic republics we will see arising in Europe in the near future..”
Dear Sir, I think I can give you an answer to your question. ZERO! Why?
(1) The muslim population is about 5% in Western Europe. It is folly to believe that you can impose muslim rule with such a small minority in a continent with large armies and police forces.
(2) Have you ever seen an Islamic republic in Albania with 57% muslims for instance.
(3) In my little country, Mauritius, muslims are 17%, a large and well off community with significant political leverage, yet still no islamic republic in sight.
Indeed percentages matter!
Curt said: “Should I convert already?” Not unless you feel the call to Islam, otherwise don’t bother.
Seriously: to europeans readers, instead of being terrorised by a handful of rioters, I’d be more concerned by climate change, peak oil, wealth disparity and largely unresolved social issues in europe.
Regards!
PS: I have many family members across europe, therefore I have a stake in european affairs…
Re: “nonce verification failure” error messages
I think this happens if you have the web page open for a long time and it gets updated without you realizing it before you post a comment. The solution is to refresh the web page before attempting to comment.
RE: French unrest
What never seems to get reported in the MSM is the level of anti-Christian vandalism in France. Here are some extracts from https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/13190/french-church-urged-to-act-against-constant-attacks-
“The country is becoming de-Christianised, and there are people who wish, for whatever reason, to vandalise and destroy Christian symbols … The long-held strategy of keeping this under wraps simply does not work”.
around 1,000 attacks occurred annually on France’s 42,000 churches and chapels, as well as on cemeteries and other Christian sites, with an average of three places of worship desecrated daily.
“There are satanist cults here, as well as very extreme anarchist and libertarian groups, people often quite unstable psychologically. Individual cases cannot always be explained, but overall it is shocking and depressing”.
[Note that the obvious suspects are not named.]
And here are some facts from https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250372/more-than-800-anti-christian-incidents-reported-in-france-in-2021
Investigators have so far identified a total of 1,659 anti-religious acts last year [i.e. 2021], with 857 relating to Christianity, 589 to Judaism, and 213 to Islam.
A 2019 survey found that 48% of the French population identified as Catholic, 4% as Muslim, and 1% as Jewish, with 34% describing themselves as having no religion. But other studies suggest the percentage of Muslims is higher.
France’s Interior Ministry recorded 996 anti-Christian acts in 2019 — an average of 2.7 per day.
Lathechuck,
LOL. I like it. The super secret handshake.
And you have to watch each other like hawks as the hands finally extend, while leaning back just out of reach of the other person’s free hand.
Cheers.
Anonymous and JMG, a belated comment about the internet: I’m not sure much of it will go away suddenly, because the willingness of the state in the Western world to keep it running at all costs – but that don’t mean the state will be successful with this. As noted before, the process which makes the internet less interesting is already happening – more and more sites just rehash mainstream talking topics, so it has become markedly more difficult to find independent and individual opinions about subjects. I myself do visit only a relatively small selection of websites regularly, because of the aforementioned points.
Bout revolution in France, the problem there (and elsewhere in Europe) is, that the kind of people who have clear political goals and who can make hay out of a chaotic situation simply don’t exist anymore, excepr for a bit of controlled opposition which will be coopted into the mainstream in no time if they, contrary to all expectations, get elected. That is at least what the situation looks like in Europe from the inside.
Hey JMG
I thought you would like that idea, would probably be something to consider for your upcoming far future novel. Perhaps in the future another limit to technology will be that nature will evolve more ways to interfere with it.
Recently I’ve had another idea concerning future evolution inspired by reading through a book based on the documentary “The private life of plants” by David Attenborough. A lot of the plants in the book have developed intense symbiotic relationships with various animals, insects and fungi. For example, old oaks will often contract a fungus which will decompose their heartwood, which is essentially dead. In doing so it not only unlocks nutrients that the outer living shell of the tree can recycle, it will make it more structurally stable and resistant to wind since the trees roots don’t have to deal with the weight of the heartwood anymore. The crucial thing to my new thought is that this relationship between the oak in the fungus seems to be fairly recent.
I began to wonder if such symbiotic relationships will become more common and complex in the future. If the joining of single cells into multicellular life ushered in a unprecedented new level of biological potential, maybe the joining of different species of multicellular life in symbiotic relationships will also usher in another expansion of biological possibilities, the ones that exist today being the beginning of greater things.
Another question occurred to me, have you by any chance read anything by David Attenborough? He is a very popular naturalist in Australia and Britain, and I’m sure he must be relatively well known in America also. If you have heard of him, what is your impression of him?
JMG – Just another sign of these crazy times: there is a bill in process, passed by the Michigan House of Representatives, that would punish intentional “misgendering” as felonious intimidation, to be punished with no more than 5 years prison or $10,000 fine. (Note that this bill has not yet become law!) I grew up in Michigan, but this sounds like a good reason not to spend more time (or money) there.
As my mother taught me so many years ago, “if people try to make fun of you, that’s their problem, not yours. Don’t take the bait.”
What will the trans-activists do, though, when the rest of us simply stop speaking to or around them, for fear of saying something that will offend? I say this as someone with positive daily interactions with perfectly reasonable LGBTQ people, but I’m not looking for trouble.
Greetings boccaccio @399,
Nevertheless in spite of sporadic use of weapons, up till now there has been no shoot outs with the police and no deaths. The riots have largely subsided. I would be very surprised to see a flare up.
You wrote: “acts of hatred against the society that harbors them and not just expressions of frustration” You do realise that frustration eventually leads to hatred then to violence.
Unfortunately I do not believe that this will be a massive wake up call for France because where ever you look important questions are not being asked, such as: What are the root causes that make 3rd or 4th generation kids of immigrants still feel alienated, frustrated and full of discontent? Social dynamics being what they are, it’s never we the good people against them the bad people. Responsibilities are shared to varying degrees by all sides (I really insist on that). I neither see nor hear any french media asking these important questions. On the contrary, the narrative is :French society is good, if you riot you must be bad, incapable of adjusting to our way of life, go back to where you belong.
Blame is being placed squarely on those rioters and only on them and exclusively on them.
Not a good approach.
Regards to you!
An interesting article.
El Niño-like phenomena on longer time scales
While El Niño is an interannual climate phenomenon, the climate system of the tropical Pacific can also exhibit El Niño-like behavior on longer time scales of decades and centuries, which is linked to the east-west gradient of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific.
The team describes such a pronounced shift to El Niño-like conditions in the second half of the Little Ice Age, lasting from about 1630 to 1900 A.D. What is particularly remarkable is the short period of only one generation within which conditions changed for a period of more than 200 years.
In particular, the researchers analyzed the composition of stable hydrogen isotopes in leaf wax biomarkers (δDwax). These are molecular fossils that originate from the protective surface layer of leaves from vascular plants. The analysis provides insights into water supply during their lifetime.
The study shows a sudden and significant increase in δDwax values between 1600 and 1650 A.D., indicating a shift towards drier conditions in the western tropical Pacific during the second half of the Little Ice Age. The researchers attribute this change to a shift in the mean state of the tropical Pacific Ocean related to zonal gradients, i.e., east-west differences in sea surface temperature.
“Although there is increasing evidence that sudden climatic changes have occurred in the past, current climate models cannot reproduce such abrupt shifts in the mean state in the tropical Pacific. This highlights that the understanding of the underlying mechanisms is still limited.”
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-reveals-abrupt-shift-tropical-pacific.html
Karim Jaufeerally, A question important to me is why the burning of public libraries? Can any of your relatives living in Europe shed any light on that point?
I entirely fail to understand how a public library can be considered an instrument of oppression. Furthermore, I doubt that teenaged boys, no matter how much hyped up on blood and violence, would think of such a target if someone had not suggested it to them.
If I were a French citizen, that phenomenon of gratuitous cultural cleansing, especially when added to the attacks on French heritage (the medieval churches, large and small, part of the cultural patrimony of the world), might well convince me to hold my nose and vote for Mme. Le Pen. Here in the USA, there is growing sentiment that multiculturalism is an ideology that did not work as advertised. At least one major presidential candidate has made opposition to continued immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. BTW, I am not crying for Florida farmers. Latifundia sized farms are only possible with massive govt. subsidies, including access to underpaid labor. Islamic countries notoriously insist on respect for their religion and cultural norms by visitors–no Christian paraphernalia such rosaries and Bibles in KSA, head coverings and long gowns for women in Iran.
Minorities have rioted in the USA to be sure, but I know of no instances of deliberate library burning In earlier times, African-Americans educated themselves in libraries, sometimes using the card of a sympathetic white citizen.
JMG, a data point which might be of interest: the facility in which my daughter the LPN is employed just bit the bullet and gave across the board raises, amounts varying by seniority, but in all cases, a substantial increase in paychecks. I think there are two points to be noted here, one, the realization that workers must be able to make a decent living, and second, understanding that seniority matters. Front line managers were not permitted to pick and choose their favorites for increased compensation.
On this July 4th I think it may be appropriate to ask whether the US will survive until 2076. It seems that many regimes have lasted only about 300 years. The Ming, Ching, and Romanov regimes come quickly to mind but there have been many others. There seems to be something special about 300 years which is about 15 generations.
In regard to marriage.
I am not of Powhatan or Algonquin heritage but have been reading much about their culture, including in regards to “marriage” especially from the time of Jamestown. And like the comment above in regards to the Navaho. The Algonquin marriage was really an agreement between a man and a woman to produce a single child. The man would provide “resources” for the woman as his side of the bargain. Once a child was born the woman would raise the child and then be free of the “marriage” and free to “marry” another man, or the same man again. A “chief” would be able to “marry” multiple women at a time provided he had the resources.
The English looked at marriage as for life, and, not only that, but it had to be between two baptized people. Which is how Pocahontas eventually converted to Christianity and was baptized and then married John Rolfe and had a son, Thomas. (And a long line of famous ancestors which as far as I can glean includes the lines of Glenn Close, the Washington family/Custis Family through Washington’s sister, and Robert E Lee. But of course not Elizabeth Warren ….)
And Pocahontas was actually held hostage for a year by the English, in bad faith mind you, and she was raped by the English, most likely including John Rolfe (see his letter to the governor asking for permission to marry Pocahontas…)
All this, including up to the present time, is just different ways of looking at marriage. I agree with JMG. The key is consenting adults. As Truman once said (I paraphrase). “We will try something and see how it works. If it doesn’t work well we will try something else.”
I’ve been catching up on posts from the past couple months, and Our Werewolves, Ourselves really hit home for me. I’ve been working as a substitute teacher in our country’s ever chaotic middle schools , as I want some experience to start teaching full time soon. The kids in general are not alright in society as a whole, but the boys especially are really chafing under the modern school system in particular. I’m not sure exactly what could be done to make a new outlet for their energy in early adolescence these days; trade school and military service (despite modern military problems) are great for older teenage boys and young men, but what to have them do during the early wolf years besides more extracurricular sports options and gym/recess?? Ideas or examples of things being tried anywhere, anyone?
On a lighter note, the sitcom 30 Rock had a bit with a song called “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah.” Though the main chorus for there was “Werewolf bar mitzvah, spooky scary / boys becoming men, men becoming wolves,” and what it sounds like was happening in ancient societies was more like boys becoming wolves first, THEN emerging as men. Still…the full version then has a verse that goes “He says tomorrow my son, you will be a man / But tonight’s the time to join the wolfen clan / Tomorrow you will stand at the bimah and pray /But tonight let’s gaze at the moon and bay”
https://youtu.be/hC44rTFo4Zk
Benedict Evans, who writes a level-headed tech newsletter, has published a more sceptical article on AI comparing it to previous rounds of automation and invoking Jevons law – see https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/7/2/working-with-ai
It makes me think that a reverse Jevons law may operate as energy becomes more expensive or more rationed.
Hello JMG,
I just purchased the kindle edition of Mount Sadhu’s “The Tarot” having bought the 1970 edition years ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see your name at the end of the introduction. Any chance you will offer discussions similar to “The Cosmic Doctrine?”
Platypus, quite plausibly, yes.
Lathechuck, I like it!
Oilman2, positive energy incoming. No question, getting old sucks, but it beats the alternative.
Lathechuck, interesting; thank you. I’ve had the habit for many years of writing comments on Notepad and then pasting them into the comment screen, so I’d never encountered that.
Polecat, you might be able to manage that somewhere in the outskirts, but it’s not something I’ve looked into. I have somewhat different plans.
Hackenschmidt, yeah, that’s more or less my take. I was reflecting earlier today that here we are in the accelerating downfall of the world’s first global empire, and more people are busy adding snarky slogans to a picture of a woman yelling at a cat than are getting ready for the impacts already lining up to hit us all.
Ron M., you’re welcome. That’s one of the reasons I host these!
Booklover, that’s quite plausible, of course. The question is purely what happens if the funding mechanisms break down to the extent that it’s a question of propping up the internet vs. letting even more critical systems fold.
J.L.Mc12, I’d want to look at the fossil evidence before reaching any conclusion about the trend of evolution. Yes, I’ve read a few things by David Attenborough.
Lathechuck, it occurs to me that that’s potentially a very useful way to deal with the woke. Say politely that you’re very concerned that you might offend them, and then refuse to speak to them at all and shun them whenever possible — all out of concern for their delicate egos, of course.
Siliconguy, fascinating. Thanks for this.
Mary, mercy, it’s the revolution. 😉 I hope other medical facilities have the common sense to follow suit. Annual raises would also be smart…
Roman, sure, but how long has England been a relatively stable political entity? A change of dynasty does not necessarily mean the end of a nation. That is to say, though I know it’s quite possible the US could crash and burn quite soon, I’m still feeling hopeful.
Gray, I wish I had something to suggest. Anyone else?
Kerry, interesting. I’ve bookmarked it.
Chelley, that book of Mouni Sadhu’s has been a fave of mine since my teen years and I’m delighted to see it back in print — along with his other very solid occult books. As for using it as the centerpiece of a book club, hmm! I’ll consider it; at the moment we’re just past the halfway point on Lévi, with most of two years still to do, but I’ll keep The Tarot in mind.
@Gray Tuesday Man (#421):
One good possibility, I think, for tenage boys, would be the para-Masonic Order of DeMolay. I don’t think that a boy needs a relative who is a Mason to join.
The Order has an impressive and instructive pair of initiation rituals, well-suited to speak to the deepest places of what it means to be a good man. It also has a useful form of lodge business, and unobtrusive male adult supervision/guidance at all meetings.
My father had been a DeMolay, though he never went on to become a Mason. But he thought the Order would do me good as a ‘teen, and he was quite right.
Like the Masons, Demolays do take an absolutely binding oath of secrecy. In consequence — unless something has changed fairly recently — the Catholic Church forbids Catholic boys to join it, just as it forbids Catholic men to become Masons.
Our host, who is a Mason, may have more up-to-date information about the Order of DeMolay than I do. It was more than sixty years since I was an active DeMolay.
One very good thing the Victorians did was foster a fair number of fraternal orders for men, with auxiliaries for boys. A very good book on this important phenomenon is Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989). (It can be read, but not downloaded, at archive.org.)
More generally, the need for ritual to mark coming of age seems to be hard-wired into the human body. One of the major things that will utterly destroy our own Western civilization down the road is (IMHO, of course) the absence of such rituals for boys and other such rituals for girls nowadays. (I don’t usually do gloomy predictions, but I have always made an exception for this one. 😛 )
Back from a weekend at “the beach” – in this case, the outskirts of St. Augustine, FL – with the family. And a side visit to Barnes & Noble. Some observations –
The buildings along the way have character, though you have the usual strip malls and the occasional ugly gray concrete flat-roofed warehouse or whatever. Even if the character was only the Mediterranean tile roofs on buildings and overhangs. We drove through a lot of farm country; corn is the major crop. IT gave me a clearer picture of the farm country in Witch of Criswell.
Not only character, but a comfortably familiar character. It was only when I spotted a ghost bicycle by the roadside, after having seen a few of the small roadside memorials seen on New Mexico roads that I realized why it felt so comfortable.
I mentioned to Carol that it wasn’t the open-air museum – thanks to whoever of the commentariat posted that description here before I left town! – I’d expected, and she outlined the impossibility of even getting close to it. Jammed with tourists, the only available parking miles down the road. Okay – no-go. But his morning, after we left the rental house at 10 am, Chris asked if I minded if we drove around some before going home. No, Chris, in fact, I’d really appreciate it, and we got to see the open-air museum in all its Gothic glory. Beautiful, stunning, impressive, and it reminded me a lot of Albuquerque’s Old Town, especially around the plaza. The difference being that St. Augustine was pure, concentrated European, whereas Old Town is pure Mexican. At any rate, it blew me away, and I was so glad we did this drive.
The Barnes and Noble was all-to-wall printed matter with a few greeting cards, notebooks, etc. I found a very large occult section under “Personal Transformation,” a fair amount of it Witchpop, but also an equally large section on astrology and one on divination. Believe it or not, I was not moved to buy anything from that section, but was very pleased to see B&N as a real book store again. Not much on science and one case on social science; world history went country by country, from England to Egypt.
The rental house was an ordinary home in a quiet residential neighborhood. It dawned on me that the family’s use of such things amounted to salary-class couch surfing. But, oh, how nice to have a single bed with a stuffed wool mattress or equivalent, and a cover that was two pieces of cotton quilted together – warm but not heavy, and a window overlooking a quiet back yard, with only the full moon to wake me up in the middle of the night. No fuss, no muss, but beautifully done. And very very few crossed swords, though a fair amount of tried patience as they went surfing and, at my own request, parked me the covered dining area at the beach, a.k.a. picnic tables and a few chairs.
As with the holiday trip to the barrier island in the Gulf, I’m filing this with moments to remember, one-time highlights.
And for what it’s worth, the annual Family Trip, which has always before been overseas, to some European country or the other, will this year be to Colorado, where her sister and two sets of cousins and an uncle live.
Welcome to the 2020s New Normal.
@Alan #149 re: yr unfinished BS degree – you know what they call that degree, with the further degrees being More of the Same, followed by your Piled Higher & Deeper. In my life, I’ve found that dusting off my hands and saying “nuts to that noise,” and quietly walking away as soon as possible, has a lot to recommend it.
Slink #407,
You are so right. We believe that the only use of oil is transport, so we try ever more outrageous ways to make this work. However, every aspect of manufacturing is oil dependent. It would surely be better to use the last drops to ensure that there is housing available for all and to save what we can for medical uses, although many residents of the US would disagree about this last point.
Stay home, have a cuppa with your neighbour, grow some food and mend your clothes.
@JMG – if we now have a senile Nero on the throne, it’s about time (after some serious gridlock a.k.a. “the year of the 4 emperors” for Vespasian to show up. Full disclosures: he’s one of the emperors I like.
One of mine has gone super woke. Bound to happen, as they say, it is easy to believe something when your livelihood depends on it. This one was a journalist, and as we know, this is a very bad time to be a journalist ! Left last position doing that 2 years ago due to management trying to change stories to be more sensationalistic. Quit and took a position in the county office of education, a PMC position. They grew up wanting to make positive difference, etc, Partner also has a job doing good works. They are both directors. Kind if like grade inflation, there are alot more directors around here due to salary tables and people needing to make rent. Anyway, this young couple have been in this PMC director jobs both for around 2years.
They were over for dinner last night. It is obviously a big deal for PMC to worry about the illegal immigrants in any and all ways. One of them was telling me, as we ate strawberries, that the people picking strawberries did not Make enough money to buy them themselves and it was terrible to have a job were you could not afford what you produce. At least 2 issues with this, first off, picking strawberries here is 16-20 an hour. Strawberries cost $5-6 organic. I mean, I can’t afford them either, at least not as far as eating an unlimited amount all the time. It was a special dinner. LOTS of people have the exact same food affordability issues in that LOTS of people make $16-20 an hour or are living off a social security check, etc… and have to make choices at the grocery store as to what to buy. Our 2 high value ag crops are strawberries and raspberries and due to the fragility and high labor costs to grow and pick, they are expensive fruit compared to tree crop fruits to buy at the grocery store. (they do GROW WELL around here and so are easy to grow in a back yard…) So, obviously, one of our ag workers can indeed buy a basket of strawberries. Second, as I pointed out to them, LOTS of workers in various occupations cannot afford what they are producing or selling. And they do often mention it to me, the contractor who cannot have a $100k kitchen in his own house, the car salesman who can’t own the fancy car, the server who can’t afford to eat in the fancy restaurant, the concereige who can’t stay in an equivalent hotel, or go on vacation, etc…. So, this is not some special circumstance for ag workers. Actually the opposite, as fruit and vegetables, including moderate or occasional expensive berries are in reach for people to partake of.
I was told that the only way we in the US could have food was by importing workers, and the only reason they put themselves thru this is to have a better opportunity for their children, it is so that their children will never have to work in ag. That is the entire goal. My opinion was that we needed to have good working conditions and respect for all needed jobs, esp including ag as it is certainly not sustainable to say that no-one should work in ag. I think it should be a viable job and be seen as a good, respectable choice of a job. They say that the only people who should work in ag should be new immigrants and only for a short time until they can quickly cycle out and so we must have a constant stream of new people who will do this work and we must have a lot of special school programs and high wages and subsidized housing and free healthcare to entice people to grow our food. We have to have special school opportunities ( we were not talking about ESL, English or language instruction here, which of course is needed for some, we were talking about supplemental science, etc…) to make up for the disadvantage of their parents not speaking English and this disadvantage is greater than the other disadvantaged children in the county who do not have parental support or money at home either. Not to mention, that there are more children grouped together in the part of the county by the farms, so it is easier to have a program that can serve a lot of children easily in one area than to try to serve the spread out poor and disadvantaged children who are saddled with the unpopular poor, uneducated English as a first language parents ( called deplorable a few years ago).
We had started out with me wondering if they could have more trade opportunities in schools, auto shop, etc…and life skills like wood working, sewing again…. But it had gone quickly to everyone should get an engineering degree and the above ag parents. So, I wondered aloud to them, well if none of the children should go into ag work and we know that we only need so many engineers or college grads, and we are going to keep importing workers, so then these children of ag workers, then we are saying that x% are going to be lifted up by your program and get a golden ticket job. Most will do this or that for a living, and then y% will join the fentanyl addicts living downtown like everyone elses % of lost young people without hope ? …. awkward silence…
So, they don’t see continual importation of workers as an issue, as the USA has so much room, they said ( but this county doesn’t have any room as they well know as they rent. We didn’t get to where in this county, high rises apartments I think is what they think. There are 5 going up downtown. ) so, they say that only people raised in another country can ( not just will) do that kind of manual labor. Anyone raised here would be incapable and would just die a lot of them and not be able to rise to the occasion out of necessity. I said we did seem to have a lot of couch potatoes, but that seemed curable. I wondered, back to education, how our society has expectations and training we provided as a community, couldnt we reverse this issue, have people who know how to work, feel that they should expect to work, by prioritizing different in our daycare/schools, etc… ? ( their field) . I mean, since it is not sustainable, in my viewpoint, to keep importing a continual changing stream of workers, can’t we come up with a plan to provide for ourselves as a society ? My offspring talking as a child went to Waldorf school, where the kids helped clean the school, grow food in the garden, learn skills I reminded, the school made a point of developing the Childs “will force”. Couldn’t we do something else in regular schools too ? And the example of Japanese children who clean their own classrooms…..
Luckily then it was dinner time.
My offspring doesn’t set policy or programs or develop them, just does communication, and is enjoying being part of the set of young PMC in the area I think after being a starving journalist…. But, it is one thing to shake my head over the news and another to see young people otherwise intelligent not make any sense in these ways
@Hackenschmidt #408:
I’m a search engine developer, and _everyone_ who does so, does some sort of manual manipulation of search results. A well-tuned search algorithm can return some pretty impressive output, but often the best one can do without extremely specific “fine-tuning” is get all the most relevant items in the top 10 or first page or whatever. However, search engine customers and users want to see what they are looking for as the *number one* result, which is a whole ‘nother thing to, er, optimize for.
And speaking of optimization, perhaps the biggest challenge here is that the users of your platform have different goals for what they want out of the system from you and from everyone else, and will seek to game the algorithm to optimize for *their* goal. Thus Google, Amazon, et. al used to provide really good search results, and now it returns a bunch of garbage items where the title and content are basically keyword salad that’s specifically constructed to get themselves up as high as possible in the algorithm.
Exactly the same thing is going to happen (and is probably already happening) with ChatGPT; we’ve had Search Engine Optimization before, now we’ll have LLM optimization.
Ok, it seems the comments are still open. I’m sorry JMG, for taking your time. I’ve always been impressed by the way you devote the time and thought to provide useful responses to all our many comments. So, it’s this:
I’ve watched motocross for many, many years. Have you ever seen the way that the ruts, which inevitability occur in the turns, channel the riders? Thankfully, in motocross, unlike longer horizon sports, like sailing, there is always the place for a handful of throttle and a breakneck move to change the determination caused by the channeling of the riders through the turn.
I see a similar situation in the akashik space. We understand that paths more often travelled have their own gravity, so to speak. Although falling into a well-worn track seems to amplify the meager efforts of the traveller, the tendency is to deliver said traveller into a rut which is the channelization of the precut path.
For many reasons, my own participation with my growing ‘tree’, and my current readings, I’m coming around full circle on “The Cosmic Doctrine,” as an explanation for the physical universe… etc. etc… And how that makes – whatever. I have no intention of being caught into a rut, even if it looks like high-speed success. So, I’m stuck with my own cussedness, and I’m bothering you, with much respect :- )
Hey JMG
What do you do you think of David Attenborough though? And what do you think is his best book?
Yes, let’s be hopeful. I’m not sure if this is the type of post you want but here is life in America today. I was at a largely deserted shopping center today getting money from a bank ATM. Some obviously mentally deranged homeless guy was screaming and yelling in the parking lot.
He approached me screaming and yelling. He told me I was a dead man and menacingly held up a bottle of wine by the neck (I later learned he had just stolen it from a supermarket). I managed to calm him down and he disappeared.
The police had been called and arrived two minutes later. This could have escalated very quickly.
Another embarrassing screwup by the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet.
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2023/07/complete-and-total-fail-by-pacific-fleet.html?m=1
Standards have definitely gone downhill since the glory days of World War II and the Cold War. But I’m sure they were caught up on their DEI seminars and affirmative action paperwork… 😉
Robert, De Molay does indeed welcome boys whether or not their families have a Masonic connection. There’s a useful PDF guide for parents available here: https://gademolay.org/resources/manualsceremonies/parentshandbook.pdf
Patricia M, thanks for the data points. Yes, I’m hoping for a Vespasian sometime not too far in the future!
Atmospheric, as Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Cobo, do what keepeth thou from wilting shall be the loophole in the law, as Crowley didn’t say (but should have).
J.L.Mc12, I barely remember the books. They struck me as kind of bland.
Roman, glad to hear it.
Platypus, well, they had to get some impressive photos somewhere, and it’s not as though the US can provide them any more…
Hi John,
I remember when American sailors used to make fun of the Soviet Navy for it’s rust bucket ships. Now it’s the other way around.
https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-us-navy-is-rusting-away/
Speaking of Providence R.I, had you visited the city before you moved there? How did you decide you’d like to relocate there? It’s quite a change from Seattle!
Dear John Michael,
I realize that this comment of mine is being made into an extremely ‘stale’ weekly open post (and on the Fourth of July, no less), so I don’t expect too much by way of response. But I am on the verge of ending a 10-year friendship with a lady who has always been, to my mind, a bit “off”, and whose eccentricities, quirks, and frequent social, spatial, and temporal cluelessness have finally driven me to the breaking point, and made me feel that the negatives of this relationship have come to outweigh the positives.
The reason I am mentioning this to you here is because it JUST occurred to me, after having described this lady as “semi-autistic” to others who know of my frustrating friendship with her, that she may in fact have Asperger’s Syndrome, as you do. So I was just curious, do you have, or have you had, many problems in forming and retaining friendships in light of your AS? And might you have any general advice for those who are in, or who might end up in, a friendship or other relationship with somebody with Asperger’s?
I know that it is probably not fair to criticize this lady for personality traits beyond her control, but I just don’t know how to deal with the situation, after years of building resentments and frustrations, short of cutting off all contact and telling her that our friendship is over.
Thanks all, for the error message info – it’s likely because I keep the tab to ecosophia’s current (or sometimes past) page open over the course of the week – and instead ought to refresh if I feel moved to comment.
Oilman2, I’m glad to hear from you this week and had noticed your absence. My best wishes to you for continued healing.
Mary Bennet says:July 4, 2023 at 1:59 pm
Karim Jaufeerally, A question important to me is why the burning of public libraries? Can any of your relatives living in Europe shed any light on that point?
Greetings to you Mary Bennet,
(1) As an avid reader and a lover of books I deplore the burning of public libraries as much as you do.
(2) In my understanding the rioters have targeted mainly state institutions and luxury shops. In the first case symbols of authority which according to them targets and oppresses descendants of immigrants and in the second case symbols of wealth they’ll never enjoy. Hence and alas public libraries were targeted.
(3) Nevertheless the main question to ask is why do young kids go on to do such things?
Partial answers can be found in those 2 articles. Links below.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2023/07/01/the-french-model-is-now-tragically-broken/
https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/vu-du-royaume-uni-la-revolte-des-banlieues-donne-raison-au-modele-britannique
another one but in french, may be you can try google translate
(4) In february 1999, my country, Mauritius, experienced serious riots that lasted 3 days and nearly got out of control. However, contrary to France, the country began a slow process of introspection about why all that happenned. And I think we made some progress in attending the serious but then neglected issues. For instance The Truth and Justice Commission of Mauritius was an independent truth commission established in 2009, which explored the impact of slavery and indentured servitude in Mauritius. The report is available on line. It was part of our collective efforts to face our common past that resulted in grievious social issues. This commission did much to dispel many prejudices that targeted sections of our population. However much remains to be done. It would be nice if France did something similar.
This commission followed what South Africa had done earlier on to tackle the toxic legacy of Aparthied. Actually, a South African professor who earlier had been on the South African commission headed ours. It would be nice if France did some similar soul searching.
Many thanks to our gracious host for this opportunity and regards to you.
Karim
From a far far away land…
Hi Karim Jaufeerally,
A few points to think about:
1) how many military age young men are from Islamic backgrounds in France? A revolution takes place from physically fit men (and to a lesser extent women).
It doesn’t really matter if you have a load of elderly white Christian French pensioners if the major urban areas have either large Muslim minorities or even majorities.
2) What about illegal migrants, who are largely from North African and ME origin (e.g. Islamic)? They are also mainly young men who can join the urban revolts and have little to lose.
3) You also completely ignore the risks of climate and water driven mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East into France over the next few decades. A mass migration of say 4 million largely youngish Islamic men into France, on top of the above factors, might push things over the edge.
So whilst I sort of agree with you that in the shorter term the risks of a Islamic republic are low – there aren’t enough young to middle aged Muslims to impose it on the rest of France – longer term I’m afraid you under-estimate the risks.
As for my own view, I think that it isn’t too late for France to save itself. It will need draconian measures but maybe these recent events might have pushed more voters into considering voting for candidates prepared to go down that hard path.
p.s. I live near France and really don’t want to see the country implode into Islamic warfare. Hopefully that can be avoided.
Roman says:
July 3, 2023 at 8:56 pm
Karim, didn’t a small group of Mongols and later a small group of Manchus take over big China?
(1) Are you sure they were a small group? Mongol armies were large most of the time.
(2) To take over a Royal dynasty consists of killing them off and entrenching yourself in the capital. Once you defeat the royal army you are half way there.
(3) To take over a country with well established institutions, large armies and police forces sounds far more difficult. Unless the french army is soundly defeated and the french public demoralised I see no way to take over France. The Germans managed that fairly quickly thanks to their Blitzkreig strategy but eventually, as we all know, the Allies had other plans.
But just to shoot myself in the foot and given that history has a peculiar sense of humour, small muslim arab armies did manage to take over the whole middle east, north africa and a good chuck of western asia, india included. They did so by defeating the royal armies, taking over the capital and then letting the natives run the new empire. Well, more or less. Somehow I doubt that would work with contemporary France. I wouldn’t advise anyone attempting that strategy anymore.
But as a counter example to my previous counter examples: to take over the Byzantium capital of Constantinopole required very large Ottoman armies and huge cannons.
Isn’t history fun?
Regards!
@Anonymoose Canadian and anyone else concerned about the situation in Canada,
I have some good news. The professor running the international BRAG Project EMF monitoring initiative, whom I was worried about, at Trent University has contacted her colleague and said that although her website was hacked, they can restore the data quickly and she will be getting in contact with the volunteers pretty soon. She has been busy publishing a new paper, and it has taken all of her time. So she at least is okay.
@SiliconGuy re: #224
I saw that story about Farage, but now it sounds like it might have been more about his (lack of) net worth. Apparently they still offered him an account through their less-posh affiliate.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/07/04/nigel-farage-coutts-dont-panic-plenty-have-normal-banks/
I have no special knowledge about the banlieues or the recent riots. I do know that buses have been regularly burned in protests near Brazilian favelas, probably instigated in most cases by local gangs. There is no ethnic difference in this case. Afro-Brazilian places of worship are regularly desecrated by Evangelicals, usually of the same skin colour. I have never heard of libraries burning, though.
@JMG Hello, this is my first ever comment on any of your blogs. I started reading your posts at the time you were writing Star’s Reach. I want to thank you for sharing your insights, they were and are extremely helpful in expanding my understanding of the unfolding decline. I am on the edge of the empire, where the cracks are already showing and expanding.
I am finding wifi connectivity to be increasingly spotty here and wanted to express my gratitude for your elucidations, before that becomes more difficult or even impossible via internet.
I have only skimmed your article about, so I won’t comment on it until I have read it fully.
I did catch something about perception of the metaphysical realms being blocked, and that was a missing piece I needed to understand why so many people seem willfully dense these days.
That helps me stay calmer and more compassionate when conversing about the state of the world with anyone uncritically consuming news or information from “trusted sources”, and there seem to be many that meet that description these days. You can’t tell them anything that they don’t already believe.
Oddly, I find the veil between the physical and the metaphysical to be thinner lately.
Sorry for this off-topic comment.
We somehow ended up talking about Henry Wallace yesterday, and I used Wikipedia to refresh my memory. Surprise, surprise. He was quite interested in Theosophy and had a long association with Nicholas Roerich. Wikipedia says that’s why he got so few votes in his presidential bid. Brother.
Does anyone have good sources of Nicholas Roerich info?
Caitlin Johnstone says many of the same things I read here on ecosophia.net, maybe using different terms, maybe from a different place. I’d like to know if others agree.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/fighting-propaganda-is-a-matter-of